For those shopping for an AI-ready mobile workstation with NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell graphics, the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 offers a lot of potential for developers, AI researchers, content creators, and others. This Linux-friendly mobile workstation is well built and aligns with ThinkPad P-Series expectations while being ready to be tasked with demanding workloads.

Lenovo sent over the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 review unit for Linux testing back in Q4 and it has worked out well on Ubuntu Linux and Fedora Workstation for those looking toward a high-end laptop with NVIDIA graphics. Being a P-Series ThinkPad it’s not so much for gamers as it is for creators and other professional workloads with the NVIDIA RTX PRO 1000 and RTX PRO 2000 Blackwell GPU options. On the CPU side there are the options of Arrow Lake H with either the Intel Core Ultra 7 255H, Core Ultra 7 265H, or Core Ultra 9 285H SoCs. Arrow Lake H offers nice performance potential and can be paired with the NVIDIA graphics – as shown in benchmarks, Arrow Lake H CPU performance can fall below the AMD Ryzen AI Max (Strix Halo) options but there you lose out on the ability to run workloads depending upon NVIDIA’s CUDA ecosystem. It’s always a balancing act.

With the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 with Arrow Lake H you also have the benefit of a CAMM2 memory slot and supporting up to 64GB of LPDDR5x-7467 memory – unlike the soldered memory options with AMD Strix Halo or the Intel Lunar Lake options only going up to 32GB of memory. On the storage side, the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 can be configured with up to 8TB of NVMe SSD storage.

The ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 features a 90 Whr battery and it is customer-replaceable too as a nice feature of this laptop. The laptop measures in at 15.8 x 354.4 x 241.2 mm and weighs starting out at 1.84 kilograms for this mobile workstation.

Ports on the laptop include an SD Express 7.0 card reader, USB-C with Thunderbolt 4, USB-A 10 Gbps, a Kensington lock slot, HDMI 2.1 output capable of 8K@60 or 4K@120, two USB-C Thunderbolt 5, and a headphone/microphone combo port. The only extra feature I would have liked to see with this ThinkPad P series laptop is a physical Ethernet port on the device itself, granted most users these days with a USB-C dock or similar won’t need to worry about that but for those not using a dock and typically relying on wired network connectivity, just be aware the lack of an integrated Ethernet port unlike some of the other P series laptops.

The review unit of the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 (21Q9ZD8SUS) was equipped with the Intel Core Ultra 7 255H, 64GB of RAM (Ramaxel RMCA1010MCC2JDF-8533), 2TB NVMe SSD (UMIS RPETJ1T24MMW1QDQ), and NVIDIA RTX PRO 1000 Blackwell discrete graphics while the Arrow Lake H (Intel Arc 140T) integrated graphics are also present and enabled. The ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 has a splendid 3840 x 2400 display.

The build quality of this laptop was right on-par with other ThinkPad P-Series laptops I have used over the years.