Ripe for Strix Halo: The next version of the ThinkPad P14s AMD needs Ryzen AI Max

With the AMD ThinkPad laptops on the market right now, Lenovo gives its customers a choice: The Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 uses AMD Ryzen 8000U, while the almost identical Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 (available from Amazon) contains AMD Ryzen 8000HS.

However, this choice is not that consequential. The Lenovo ThinkPad P14s G5 AMD does show marginally better performance in our comprehensive review, as it can feed the Ryzen 7 Pro 8840HS with more power, allowing it to maintain higher clock rates. However, the difference to the T14 G5 with the Ryzen 7 Pro 8840U is small. No wonder: Both CPUs are almost identical.

Worse for the P14s Gen 5 AMD: The GPU of both APUs is identical, too. For an office laptop like the ThinkPad T14, the GPU performance is not that important. But for a workstation like the P14s, it is.

P14s and T14 should receive updates soon, as the AMD Ryzen 8000 CPUs still base on the old Zen 4 architecture. With the new models, Lenovo should try to differentiate the two versions more. While the T ThinkPad should use Strix Point, we hope that the P14s will use Strix Halo aka Ryzen AI Max instead. The main advantage of Ryzen AI Max is the much better GPU performance - no wonder that HP uses these CPUs in the upcoming HP ZBook Ultra 14.

Lenovo should not make the mistake again to not prioritize the GPU performance of its ThinkPad P14s AMD - otherwise, this model becomes completely uninteresting compared with the competition.