Lenovo ThinkStation P360 Ultra crams 16 CPU cores and a GPU into a tiny desktop - Ars Technica

One of those is Lenovo's new ThinkStation P360 Ultra, a mini desktop that crams Intel's 12th-generation Alder Lake desktop CPUs, Nvidia RTX A2000 and A5000 GPUs with up to 16GB of VRAM, and a surprising amount of expandability into a small enclosure that's just 3.9 liters in volume.

The ThinkStation has lots of ports for a system its size, with a total of seven DisplayPort outputs in back (three full-size ports wired to the integrated Intel GPU, and four mini DisplayPorts connected to the dedicated GPU), one 2.5Gbps Ethernet port, another 1Gbps Ethernet port, and four rear USB-A ports on the back.

Lenovo offers Alder Lake CPUs from the quad-core Core i3 all the way up to a Core i9 with a total of 16 cores (eight P-cores and eight E-cores—our CPU reviews show the benefits of these smaller cores for workloads that distribute well across many CPU cores).

The P360 is smaller than high-performance mini PCs like Intel's NUC 12 Extreme, which also uses 12th-gen Alder Lake CPUs with up to 16 cores—the NUC measures 14.1×7.4×4.7 inches, while the ThinkStation is just 8.7×7.9×3.4 inches.

But the NUC does have the advantage of using a standard PCI Express slot with a GPU that can be upgraded a couple years down the line, though its small size will generally limit you to physically smaller GPUs than you can use in a full-size desktop or a roomier mini ITX PC build.

We also don't know whether (or how much) the P360 Ultra's CPU or GPU will be constrained by power or heat limitations—the system tops out at a 300 W power supply, which is less power than a high-end desktop GPU like the RT 3080 or 3090 can consume all by itself.