A question of sense: The Lenovo ThinkPad P14s G3 AMD is pretty redundant

Previously the case with Lenovo's ThinkPads, they used to also release their 15-inch T series devices as W series ThinkPads for the workstation market. The last time this happened was with the ThinkPad T550 and ThinkPad W550s in 2015.

The ThinkPad P series, the replacement for the W ThinkPads, appeared at the end of 2015. The new ThinkPad P50 and P70 models stood out for having a unique design that was not based on the T-series. However, Lenovo did not completely abandon their tradition of "rebranding" and the ThinkPad T560 was also brought out as the ThinkPad P50s. This series still exists today, and Lenovo has meanwhile expanded it to the 14-inch models and AMD variants as well.

We recently highlighted the ThinkPad P14s Gen 3 AMD in our detailed review. On the whole, it is pretty much identical to the ThinkPad T14 Gen 3 AMD (available on Amazon for $1,661). Which raises the question of its sense (or lack thereof), because apart from marketing, we cannot find a reason as to why this workstation variant exists.

Unlike previous cases where the workstation variants at least included dedicated workstation GPUs, there are no differences between the two in terms of hardware. The ThinkPad P14s Gen 3 does have slightly increased power limits, but that is not enough to justify a separate model in our opinion.

For future models, Lenovo should probably think about how to better differentiate the P14s and T14. The AMD platform supports ECC RAM, for example - this option remains unused in the P14s, but could prove to be a useful feature for workstation customers. They could also think about installing an SD card reader in the P14s instead of a smartcard reader. And last but not least: A dGPU such as the Nvidia RTX A1000 would be extremely beneficial for the P14s, but probably unrealistic since this would require major changes to its design.