When Intel announced that it is speeding up its development of next-gen Skylake processors, the tech world was waiting if the company would be expanding the much-improved chipsets outside of desktop computing. Intel responded by configuring the professional-grade Xeon CPU using the Skylake's architecture but designed it specially for mobile workstations.
Now, Lenovo will be the first one to use the next-gen processors for its products, as the company has announced that a new lineup in its ThinkPad series will roll out run by the next-gen Skylake architecture.
Two consumer models, the ThinkPad P50 and P70, use Xeon processors for their CPUs. This makes the laptops two of the most powerful mobile workstations to date. In addition, the new Lenovo ThinkPad series offer amped up specs and hardware.
In terms of display, both the P50 with its smaller 15.6-inch screen and the larger 17-inch P70 have 4K resolution and Nvidia Quadro graphics. In addition, both mobile workstations also offer up to 64 GB of DDR4 RAM and, depending on how powerful and broad a user wants the storage to be, a 2-TB mechanical drive plus 1 TB PCIe SSD. The P50 and P70 also feature a detachable DVD-RW drive, which when removed can be exchanged with an additional 512-GB SSD or 1-TB mechanical drive for users who have high storage requirements.
Aside from the powerful specs under the hood, the new ThinkPads also offer much improved features. The most remarkable upgrade that the new ThinkPads have is Lenovo's move to fully integrate support for Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.1 for the Type-C ports. This means that in terms of data transfer, users can experience up to 10 Gbps transfer speed on the standard USB connections, and up to 40 Gbps using the Thunderbolt 3 mode.
The new ThinkPads also have four USB 3.0 ports, HDMI, an ExpressCard slot, and a mini-DisplayPort.
