More Intel Apollo Lake laptops to use onboard memory

There will be a big shift to onboard memory for the low-cost Intel Apollo Lake SoC based laptops, according to sources from Taiwan's notebook supply chain. The move to onboard memory instead of DIMMs allows the laptop makers to design their notebooks as slim as possible, but makes it impossible to upgrade the RAM afterwards. A large batch of the new Atom "Apollo Lake" based systems is expected in Q4 2016.

The report from DigiTimes also notes a higher ratio of new notebooks will ship with LPDDR4 memory due to the lower power consumption and higher performance of this memory.

Acer has two new ultra-thin notebooks, the Aspire S 15 and S 17, both featuring a thickness of less than 17mm, which it will showcase at September's IFA show, indicated the sources.

Other vendors, including Lenovo, Asustek Computer, HP and Dell are also expected to focus on ultra-thin notebooks and 2-in-1 models for the second half of 2016, added the sources.