AMD Ryzen 5 3550H vs AMD Ryzen 5 2600

AMD Ryzen 5 3550H

The AMD Ryzen 5 3550H is a mobile SoC that was announced in January 2019. It combines four Zen+ cores (8 threads) clocked at 2.1 GHz to 3.7 GHz with a Radeon RX Vega 8 graphics adapter with 8 CUs (512 Shaders) clocked at up to 1,200 MHz. Compared to the similar Ryzen 5 3500U, the 3550H offers a 20 Watt higher TDP and therefore a better performance under long periods of load. The integrated dual-channel memory controller supports up to DDR4-2400 memory. As the features of the Picasso APUs are the same compared to the Raven Ridge predecessors, we point to our Raven Ridge launch article.

The Picasso SoCs use the Zen+ microarchitecture with slight improvements that should lead to a 3% IPS (performance per clock) improvements. Furthermore, the 12 nm process allows higher clock rates at similar power consumptions.

Performance

The average 3550H in our database proves to be a solid mid-range CPU, its multi-thread benchmark scores hovering close to those of the Intel Core i7-10710U and the Core i5-8257U. Which is a little slow for an H-class processor, as of late 2021, but still more than enough for the vast majority of apps and games, provided one is fine with having to wait a little longer than usual for that 4K video encoding job to get completed.

Thanks to its decent cooling solution and sufficiently high CPU power limits, the Pavilion Gaming 15-ec0002ng is among the fastest laptops powered by the 3550H that we know of. It can be more than 20% faster in CPU-bound workloads than the slowest system featuring the same chip in our database, as of August 2023.

Power consumption

This Ryzen 5 series chip has a default TDP (also known as the long-term power limit) of 35 W. Laptop makers are free to reduce that value significantly with 12 W being the minimum AMD-recommended value. Clock speeds and performance would take a hit as a result; either way, that's a little too high to allow for passively cooled designs.

Last but not the least, the AMD Ryzen 5 3550H is built with a 12 nm process for lower-than-average, as of mid 2023, energy efficiency.

AMD Ryzen 5 2600

The AMD Ryzen 5 2600 is a six-core desktop processor that can handle twelve threads simultaneously thanks to Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT). This technology is equivalent to Intel's Hyper-Threading. Launched in April 2018, the Ryzen 5 2600 is the second fastest Ryzen 5 processor and is much more economical than its flagship sibling. The Ryzen 5 2600 has a 65 W TDP, which is nearly 40% more efficient than the 95 W TDP Ryzen 5 2600 X. This energy efficiency comes at a cost to performance though.

The Ryzen 5 2600 has a base clock speed of 3.4 GHz, which can be boosted by Extended Frequency Range (XFR) up to 3.9 GHz. The power gain is still high in multi-threaded applications, although this is some way off the Ryzen 5 2600X. The Ryzen 5 2600 benefits from AMD's new Zen+ architecture, with a greater number of instructions per cycle (IPC) and higher clock speeds than last year's Zen chips. The Ryzen 5 2600's six cores are divided into two clusters that are connected by Infinity Fabric, a subset of HyperTransport. Each cluster has its own L3 cache.

The Ryzen 5 2600 has good performance in games. Moreover, the Ryzen 5 2600 has a higher base clock than the Ryzen 7 2700. Seeing as many games currently lack multi-core support, this means that the Ryzen 5 2600 performs better than its technically superior sibling.

Detailed information, benchmarks and values can be found in our review of the Ryzen 5 2600.