ThinkPad Roadmap Leak 2018: ThinkPad A285 & A485 with Ryzen, T580p & ThinkPad P1 with Coffeelake Hexa-Core CPUs?

Lenovo brought a truckload of new ThinkPads to the CES. For example a redesigned X1 Tablet 3, the X1 Carbon 6 with a HDR screen or new standard business models like the ThinkPad X280 and T480.

This means that the Chinese manufacturer has updated the largest part of the ThinkPad portfolio, but not all ThinkPad models have the newest CPU generation now. One prominent ThinkPad series missing: The ThinkPad P series, Lenovo's mobile workstation line. Though Lenovo already announced the workstation-variant of the T580, the ThinkPad P52s, the core of the line is still missing: The successors of the Thinkpad P51 and ThinkPad P71. These laptops still use the 45 W H series CPUs of Intels 7th Core i generation, because Intel has not announced their Coffeelake successors with six-cores yet. Another missing ThinkPad series is the new A series with the models A275 and A475 – both are still waiting for a Ryzen update.

Today, a leak of a Lenovo roadmap appeared. This leak does not expose all of Lenovo's plans for the rest of  2018, but it does provide some clues. The source of this leak is the ThinkPad subreddit.

One of the slides of this leaked internal Lenovo-presentation, which mostly is about the newly announced 2018 ThinkPads, provides a roadmap for Lenovo's new CS18 ThinkPad docking system for 2018. In this roadmap we can find the new models ThinkPad A285 and ThinkPad A485, which are marked as compatible with  the new docks. A285 and A485 are likely the Ryzen updates of the older A series ThinkPads, although they are probably based on the X280 and T480 instead of the X270 and T470. It seems fitting that AMD introduced its new Ryzen Pro Mobile processors for business laptops a few days ago.

There is another unannounced ThinkPad model hidden in this roadmap: The ThinkPad T580p. Apart from the fact that it will have a 15-inch screen, we don't know anything about the T580p at this point. It would make sense though if its a Hexa-Core variant of the ThinkPad T580, just like the T470p, which was the Quad-Core variant of the T470. By the way: The document also confirms the cancellation of the T470p-line, which means there won't be a T480p.

Last but not least, the new P series is also mentioned, although only in the footnotes. In one of the other slides, which talks about the USB C PowerDelivery features on ThinkPads, the footnote reads that the new P models like the ThinkPad P52 and ThinkPad P72 do not support USB C charging due to the 100 W limitation of USB C. Also included in the footnote is the ThinkPad P1. As with the T580p, we don't know much about this mystery ThinkPad, though it seems certain that it will use the H series Hexa-Core CPUs, if it can not use USB PowerDelivery. As part of the P series, a Nvidia Quadro GPU being part of the package seems a safe bet.

At the moment its all still speculation, of course – the leak does not provide any detailed informations on the specifications. Nor does it include any launch dates for these unannounced ThinkPads, so we can only guess when they will be announced.

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