Surprisingly, with arrival on the market already towards the end of the month, Lenovo has unveiled its new workstation, with a small form factor, ThinkStation P360 Ultra, powered by Intel Alder Lake processors up to the i9 with vPro option.
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Despite increasing computing performance, advances in component miniaturization mean that large towers or servers are no longer required for complex tasks, such as animation or 3D modeling, but can also converge on smaller workstations. In this sense, Lenovo, challenging Zotac, HP and DELL, announced the ThinkStation P360 Ultra mini workstation (by the end of the month, starting at $ 1,299).
The newcomer has an ecological chassis (26.5% post-consumer recycled plastic) with dimensions of 87 x 223 x 202 mm, with a volume of 3.92 liters which, according to the company, is about half of many workstation SFF (small form factor): inside, the company is considering placing 12th generation Intel processors, and precisely models i3, i5, i7 and i9 (in this case up to 16 cores, of which 8 hyper-performing with 5.2 GHz of Turbo Boost), being able to reach 125W of TDP. For graphics cards, initially, waiting to also have the Nvidia RTX A5500 options and with regard to a “class 3000” GPU, we start with an Nvidia RTX A2000 or A5000: in the second case, it is not the desktop version, but of the mobile one for laptops, however impressive due to its 6,144 CUDA cores, 192 Tensor cores, 48 RT cores, the 256 MB of bus memory, and the 16 GB of reserved GDDR6 memory, for which the manufacturer had to collaborate with Nvidia for ad hoc cooling.
Precisely in terms of dissipation, Lenovo has also collaborated with Intel for the Intel W680 motherboard, dual face, placed in the middle of the chassis, in order to let the air flow above and below, with three accompanying radial fans (one of which is located specifically on the two M.2 slots for SSDs). On the sides of the chipset there are, on the right and left, two SODIMM slots (total: 4), which allow you to mount up to 128 GB, ECC or less, of DDR5-4000 RAM: the SSD storage, with support for RAID 0 / 1, thanks to the two m.2 slots, can reach 8 TB, and there is also a 2 and a half inch SATA slot, for a mechanical hard disk of up to 1 TB.
Equipped, depending on the processing choices, with 170, 230 or 300 W external power supplies, the ThinkStation P360 Ultra compact workstation places on the front panel a USB 3.2 2nd gen Type-A, an audio combo jack and two USB 3.2 2nd gen Type -C for Thunderbolt 4: behind, there are two RJ45 (2.5 GbE and 1 GbE), three Display Ports, a poker of USB 3.2 2nd gen Type-A. In terms of wireless connectivity, everything varies according to the vPro option: without the latter, you stop at Wi-Fi 6 (AX201 modem with also Bluetooth 5.0), whereas with the vPro you get to Wi-Fi 6E (AX211 modem with also with Bluetooth 5.2n).
