22 hrs battery life, 5G, PCIe 5.0: Here is what is new with the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 G9

When Lenovo announced the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 9 in March 2026, its predecessor, the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 was barely a few months on the market. On paper, the ThinkPad P1 G9 is like the earlier model in many ways: an expensive premium workstation laptop with a 16-inch screen. After all, it was pretty much just an update of the existing device, keeping the same chassis, ports and even GPUs, with the only big news being the new Intel Panther Lake CPUs. However, we recently reviewed the ThinkPad P1 Gen 9, and there is more to this device than it seems at first.

Intel Panther Lake: A consequential platform update

From the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 to the P1 Gen 9, Lenovo swaps out the older Intel Arrow Lake CPUs for Intel Panther Lake. Intel's first 18A processor series, which is marketed as the Intel Core Ultra 300, showed in our review that it massively improves the efficiency of this Lenovo laptop. Performance stagnates overall, but battery life improves massively: The Lenovo ThinkPad P1 G9 achieves more than 22 hrs of battery life, which is more than double of any of the previous P1 models - a true battery life revolution for this type of device.

5G connectivity: Lenovo finally brings this feature back

Mobile connectivity is an important part of the ThinkPad series. After all, this business laptop series is often used by workers for business traveling, and instead of relying on insecure public Wi-Fi, inbuilt celular connectivity is a sought after feature in this market segment.

Unfortunately, Lenovo nixed the feature with the ThinkPad P1 Gen 7. But it is now back with the new Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 9. Our review model did not feature 5G, but the optional Qualcomm Snapdragon X61 is available for this model.

PCIe 5.0, new keyboard: Other changes

The ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 was notable for one thing: Shipping with PCIe 5.0 SSDs, but not actually supporting them. While the Arrow Lake H platform did include support for PCIe 5.0, due to sharing the mainboard with its predecessor P1 Gen 7, the P1 Gen 8 lacked this feature. Lenovo remedies this with the ThinkPad P1 Gen 9: The new model now does support PCIe 5.0 speed one one of its two M.2 2280 slots, which improves SSD performance greatly in our testing.

Besides that, Lenovo did bring one design change: A revised keyboard, which includes centered key printing, as well as a change to the European keyboard layouts. Read more about this change and the ThinkPad P1 Gen 9 in our comprehensive review of the ThinkPad P1 Gen 9.