Apollo family 3 vs 4

Development Boards Artemis
1

Hi,

I see that the Apollo family 4 is coming out soon:

https://ambiq.com/apollo4/

I am considering which chips I should include in my next project and I have a few questions:

  • will the Apollo 4 cover the same “market segment” or a different one compared with the Apollo 3 inside the Artemis products? It looks like it has better uA / MHz, but at the same time, it looks like the frequencies are typically quite a bit higher, and there are more peripherals that may or may not be relevant for most embedded sensors projects (like, audio and display modules)?

  • will the Apollo3 products and Artemis derivatives remain in production even after the Apollo4 comes out (I guess so? :slight_smile: ), and if so, do you have an idea for how long?

  • if I am to start a project that should have a typical lifetime of 5 or more years, with possibly several production runs in the next 5 years to come, but I am flexible on the starting date, would you recommend waiting for the Apollo4 products to come out in the form of updated Artemis products (and are there some plans for that?)?

  • How would you expect porting some code from Apollo3 to Apollo4 will look like? Do you think this may be an easy, or painful operation?

Thanks!

2

Thanks for the update . I’ll be sure to keep an eye on this thread. Looking for the same issue. Bumped into your thread. Thanks for creating it. Looking forward for solution.

3

Looks like there is also a new member of the Apollo3 family, with double the RAM and the Flash: see Apollo 3 Blue plus: https://ambiq.com/apollo3-blue-plus/ .

I think though that the Apollo 4 blue remains more attractive, since it has so much more RAM and Flash. Would really love to see Sparkfun update to the Apollo 4, having so much more resources available would mean a lot.

4

Looks like Ambiq has Apollo4 blue chips actually on stock, which was not the case for really long time.

Apollo4 also has integrated HIGH SPEED(!) USB support.

I cross my fingers and hope that Sparkfun will launch their module and boards based on Apollo4 and implement SD slots with SDIO4 connection. That way we would have an ULP solution that could log a ton of data and also transfer all those via a USB cable in just some seconds.