Lenovo says it’s crammed a workstation into a litre of space – less than three cans of beer

Can a Core i9 machine be a workstation? If you think not, Lenovo also has tiny Xeons

Lenovo has given the world a workstation that occupies less than one litre of space – less than three cans of beer – an impressive feat if you think a Core i9 processor qualifies as a workstation.

The very small workstation is called the “ThinkStation P350 Tiny” and measures 36.5mm x 182.9mm x 179mm. Inside you’ll find the aforementioned Core i9-11900, in configurations up to eight cores at 5.2GHz, a pair of SoDIMM slots that can handle 32GB apiece, two M.2 storage slots, and enough space to include an Nvidia P1000 or T600 GPU (which let the machine drive up to half a dozen monitors).

A sole USB-C port is joined by five USB-A ports, HDMI, DisplayPort and Mini-DisplayPort, and RJ-45 connectors. Wi-Fi 6 is also available.

An Intel Q570 chipset holds it all together.

Lenovo has styled the Tiny as an entry-level workstation that’s “uniquely qualified for enabling OEM solutions and can be used as a host for like-local remote workstation power.”

Remote workstations are quite the thing now as the environments in which such souped-up PCs thrive are hard to replicate in the cloud. Architects, animators, finance services number crunchers and other workstation users have found it harder to work from home than those who can get along with vanilla PCs. So maybe Lenovo is onto something here, even if the machine is modestly-specced.

For those who need more grunt, Lenovo has also launched the ThinkStation P350 in Tower and Small Form Factor configurations.

Both gain the ability to handle a Xeon W-1390P, up to 128GB of RAM spread across four SoDIMM slots, up to seven drives shared across M.2 and SATA connections, while also offering three PCIe expansion slots – one at version 4.0 and two version 3.0.

You also get more ports to handle I/O storms: four USB 3.2 ports are joined by three DisplayPorts, a pair of serial ports, a single HDMI, a pair of PS/2s and the obligatory RJ45.

The Tower can fit an Nvidia RTX 5000 – which boasts 384 tensor cores, 3072 CUDA cores, and 48 RT cores – within its 170mm x 315.4mm x 376mm chassis. The Small Form Factor measures 92.5mm x 309.7mm x 339.5mm, which only leaves enough space for Nvidia’s ominously named T1000 GPU, a device aimed at laptops which offers a measly 896 CUDA cores. Intel’s W580 chipset is found in both machines.

Prices start at $969 for the Tower, $949 for the Small Form Factor and $899 for the Tiny model, with kit shipping from July 23rd.

Lenovo claims the Tiny is the world’s smallest workstation. HP Inc will struggle to defend that claim as its Z2 Mini measures 216mm x 216mm x 58mm36. ®