Lenovo has unleashed its very first pair of mobile workstations to the world, and while the ThinkPad P70 packs in more power than the smaller ThinkPad P50, both laptops bring the Chinese computer company a firmer hold on the enterprise PC industry.
Unveiled at the SIGGRAPH graphics conference, both the P70 and the P50 are the first laptops to be powered by the recently introduced Intel Xeon E3-1500M v5 product family. Previously, the Xeon brand was limited to data centers and desktop workstations, but with the growing number of professionals on-the-go and mobile enterprises in various industries, it was only a short while before Intel announced new mobile-centric chips to satisfy the demand.
"We've built features into these machines that were previously unachievable in a notebook, making them the most versatile and highest-performing mobile workstations ever," Victor Rios, vice president and general manager of Lenovo's workstations business, says. "We're focused on making sure users have the tools necessary to drive innovation. That is why we are expanding our portfolio and raising the standard of mobile workstation performance."
Just how high are the new standards? Both workstations have a whopping 64 GB of DDR4 RAM in four SO-DIMM slots. The bigger P70, which measures 17 inches, has space for a 2 TB hard drive and 1 TB of SSD storage, while the more compact, 15-inch P50 can accommodate up to 2 TB of storage. Both devices also have a new Nvidia Quadro GPU, with a lower configuration for the P50.
Obviously, the smaller P50 is the more attractive option for those who prefer a lighter workstation they can lug around. At 5.6 pounds, it is more portable than the P70, which weighs 7.6 pounds. But there are, of course, a few tradeoffs. One of these, aside from the size and weight of the devices, is the number of Thunderbolt 3 ports, which supports the new USB-C standard and allows for high-speed file transfers up to 10 Gbps. The P70 has two Thunderbolt 3 ports, while the P50 only has one.
Other than that, both the P70 and P50 offer powerful capabilities that make them worthy of being called mobile workstations. The display on both laptops can range anywhere from Full HD to stunning 4K, and both have a Pantone X-Rite color calibrator to keep colors accurate even after a long time, a feature that professionals in the media industry will certainly find useful.
They also use a dual-fan cooling system configured to cool the GPU or the CPU, depending on which one is currently experiencing heavy thermal load. The workstations also have a fingerprint reader that requires users to press rather than swipe, which should be more reliable than the swipe-style fingerprint scanners available today.
Both the P70 and P50 ship with Windows 10 out of the box, but users can also choose to install Windows 7 or Ubuntu Linux if they wish.
Both mobile workstations ship sometime in the fourth quarter of 2015. The P70 will be $1,999, while the P50 will be $1,599.
