Lenovo's New ThinkStation P720 And P920 Workstations Sport Intel Xeon CPUs

Lenovo's new ThinkStation P720 and P920 workstations feature the new Intel Xeon Bronze, Gold, Silver and Platinum processors. The increased core count as well as increased memory bandwidth afforded by the six-channel memory promises drastic performance increases over the previous generation, especially in applications that are dependent on core count and memory bandwidth.

ThinkStation P720

The ThinkStation P720 is the smaller of the two. It features dual processor sockets, twelve slots for DDR4-2666 memory, four drive bays, three PCIe x16 slots, one PCIe x8 slot, once PCIe x4 slot, and a single PCI slot. It also has two onboard M.2 connectors, which are directly on the motherboard instead of on a mezzanine card as they were on the previous generation of Lenovo workstations.

The smaller chassis of the P720 limits it to two dual-slot graphics cards. The 5 1/4” bay with front access can be used to house additional hard drives or SSDs, bringing the total number of storage drives to six.

ThinkStation P920

The new top of Lenovo's workstation line is the Thinkstation P920. Like the P720, it's a dual-processor machine, but in a larger chassis that allows for more expansion. It features sixteen slots for DDR4-2666 memory, four drive bays, five PCIe x16 slots, and three PCIe x4 slots. Like the P720, it also has two M.2 connectors on the motherboard.

The case's larger internal volume allows for more expansion cards, giving it the capacity to take three dual-slot graphics cards instead of two. It should be noted that in both systems, using the maximum number of dual-slot cards limits the accessibility of some of the other expansion slots.

Lenovo anticpates a 43% performance improvement over the previous generation of machines due to a combination of the additional processor cores and memory bandwidth.

The Lenovo ThinkStation P720 and P920 are expected to be available in October.