Lenovo: AMD Ryzen models ThinkPad A285 and ThinkPad A485 listed online for the first time

Lenovo ThinkPads always were a bastion for Intel CPUs. This has been true ever since the first release of the well-known laptop brand in 1992 by IBM. ThinkPads without Intel CPUs have been rare exceptions. Since 2010, Lenovo has released a few ThinkPad laptops with AMD CPUs, but those only were budget-models, like the ThinkPad X100e. The "real" ThinkPads continued to exclusively use Intel processors.

That was true until 2017 when Lenovo released the new ThinkPad A series, which exclusively uses AMD CPUs. The A series isn't completely new though, as the business-laptops simply reuse existing designs of the ThinkPad T and X series. For last years models, this meant that the ThinkPad A275 was based on the Thinkpad X270 and the ThinkPad A475 was based on the ThinkPad T470. As these models were released in the fall of 2017, they came out a little bit too early for the Ryzen CPUs. Instead, they were based on older Bristol-Ridge CPUs, which paled in comparison to contemporary Intel processors.

The year 2018 is almost half past over and Lenovo has released many new ThinkPad laptops in the meantime, including the ThinkPad X280 and ThinkPad T480. But there were almost no signs of new A series ThinkPads. This has changed now, as ThinkPad A285 and ThinkPad A485 are listed on the Lenovo site for the first time.

The specs of these new models are not particularly extensive, there are also no high-quality pictures. Based on the specs, the ThinkPad A285 is virtually a "ThinkPad X285" and the ThinkPad A485 is virtually a "ThinkPad T485", as the weight of the AMD models is exactly the same as the ThinkPad X280 and ThinkPad T480. The listings also confirm that both are based on Ryzen, as they are supposed to include "up to" the AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 2700U.

There are no informations on pricing or availability at this time, though we would expect them in the near future.

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