Lenovo ThinkPad P15s G2: Workstations with ULV CPUs are getting better and better

In 2015, the last model of the old Lenovo workstation series, the ThinkPad W series, was introduced. This was the Lenovo ThinkPad W550s, which was also the beginning of a new model series. This was the first time that Lenovo had introduced a mobile workstation with an ultra-low voltage processor to the market. Originally the ULV CPUs came from the segment of ultra-slim ultrabooks, and this was a new development for a workstation.

However, the result in 2015 wasn't so great: the first 14-nanometer CPUs of the Intel Broadwell generation were simply not powerful enough and did not achieve a good performance with their two cores. The performance of the Quadro K620M Kepler GPU in the W550s was also weak.

Five years later, the current successor of the W550s is called Lenovo ThinkPad P15s Gen 2. At this point, the laptop uses 10-nanometer CPUs of the Intel Tiger Lake series and an Nvidia GPU of the Turing generation. While both of these components are part of the energy efficient and low-end segments, the performance of the ThinkPad P15s G2 is not to be underestimated.

In our detailed test, the ThinkPad laptop achieved scores that were only slightly worse than those of a ThinkPad P52 from 2018, which was significantly thicker, heavier, and more expensive. 

However, if you need as much performance as possible, of course a more current model with H CPUs such as the Lenovo ThinkPad P15 G1 continues to be the much better choice. But we can still observe that the concept of workstations with ultrabook CPUs works at this point.