Lenovo announces the first Arm-based ThinkPad. at

Lenovo’s ThinkPad X13s will be the first ThinkPad to use an Arm-based processor, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, Lenovo announced Friday.

ThinkPads represent Lenovo’s most powerful laptop series and are marketed to enterprises and power users. It’s interesting to see one of the machines pass the new Intel 12th generation and AMD Ryzen 6000 laptop chips to put Windows 11 Pro on Arm. We briefly saw the ThinkPad X13s in person, and it felt lighter, cheaper plastic, but also had a textured matte finish.

The 8cx Gen 3 is the first 5nm Windows PC SoC. It has four Arm Cortex-X1 cores at up to 3 GHz and four Cortex-A78 cores at 2.4 GHz. The Qualcomm chip enables the ThinkPad X13s’ fanless design and extended battery life. The upcoming ThinkPad is 0.53 inches thick and 2.35 pounds and comes with a 49.5 Whr battery that Lenovo claims will last up to 28 hours, based on local video playback.

A Lenovo spokesperson told Ars Technica that the company believes it’s time to put an Arm-based chip in a ThinkPad, as the performance is now suited to its power-focused lineup. The rep said the expected performance should be in line with an Intel Core i5 CPU. Particularly important to enterprise customers, security hardware and software, including ThinkShield, memory encryption, and endpoint security, are the same as what is found on Intel and AMD-based ThinkPads.

Windows apps with native support include Microsoft 365, Zoom, and Sophos, while some x64 apps require emulation for Windows 11 on Arm. Lenovo’s announcement also pointed to “enhanced x64 emulation in Windows 11,” claiming it will improve the performance of legacy apps and allow independent software vendors to slowly run their apps natively on the operating system through the ARM64EC application binary interface.

The ThinkPad X13s has a 13.3-inch, 1920 x 1200 display that uses the higher aspect ratio of 16:10 (as opposed to the more common 16:9). All of Lenovo’s ThinkPads will use 16:10 displays this year, which will be standard for ThinkPads in the future, except for the L-series. Lenovo also announced its first 16:10 portable monitor today. A spokesperson told Ars Technica that its business customers are more open to the aspect ratio.

The thinner laptop uses up to 32GB of LPDDR4x memory, while other ThinkPads announced today use desktop-grade DDR5 RAM. Lenovo’s upcoming clamshell also supports a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD.

Ports are limited to two USB-C Gen 2 slots, a 3.5mm jack and a SIM card slot for 5G.

Triple-array microphones and a 5 MP infrared camera are housed in a bar on the top edge.

Using the 8cx Gen 3, the machine should offer better human presence detection, allowing the laptop to take security measures such as turning off or dimming the laptop’s brightness when you’re not in front of the camera.

The ThinkPad 13s will start at $1,099 when it comes out in May.

New Intel and AMD based 16-inch ThinkPads

In addition to the ThinkPad X13s, Lenovo announced numerous Intel and AMD-based upgrades to its ThinkPad lineup today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, ​​with the most expensive being the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 5.

As the name suggests, this is the most powerful of the bunch; it will have a Core i9 H-series vPro chip of the 12th generation. To support a 45W chip, Lenovo tweaked the laptop’s thermal design by introducing dual inlet fans near the keyboard, liquid metal thermal paste, and a redesigned vapor chamber. Lenovo claims that the laptop will have 10 percent better cooling than the previous generation.

The laptop comes with an RTX 3080 Ti (16GB) laptop graphics card, 64GB DDR5 RAM, and two SSDs totaling 8TB. It has a larger screen than the previous version at 16 inches (versus 15.6 inches) and a resolution of up to 3840 x 2400.

The port selection is more extensive than in the Arm-based ThinkPad; the Intel machine has HDMI 2.1, two USB Type-A 3.1 ports, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, an SD card reader, a 3.5mm jack and an optional SIM card slot. It is heavier and thicker than the fanless X13s at 4.14 pounds and 0.78 inches.

Lenovo’s extreme ThinkPad starts at $2,049 in June.

Lenovo is also introducing a 16-inch option for the ThinkPad T series. The ThinkPad T16 comes with a 12th-generation Intel Core i7 P-series or U-series vPro or AMD Ryzen 6000 Pro-series chip at 20 W. The specifications differ between the Intel and AMD versions, with the Intel laptop more offers RAM (32GB LPDDR5-6400 vs 48GB DDR4-3200) and the option of an Nvidia GeForce MX550 or RTX 2050 graphics card. The screen of the AMD laptop goes up to a resolution of 3840 x 2400, while the Intel is limited to 2560 x 1600.

The laptops will be available in June and start at $1,299 for an AMD-equipped model.