Geekbench confirms that the AMD Ryzen 5 5500U is effectively a rebranded Ryzen 5 4600U

The Ryzen 5 5500U may sound like the successor to the Ryzen 5 4500U, but it is more of a halfway house between the latter and the Ryzen 5 5600U. In other words, the Ryzen 5 5500U appears to be a rebranded Ryzen 5 4600U. A leak by @ExecuFix last month stated that this would be the case, which Geekbench has now reinforced.

According to a listing posted today, the Ryzen 5 5500U has six cores and supports Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT), as the Ryzen 5 4600U does. Additionally, Geekbench reports a base clock of 2.1 GHz and a boost clock of 4.04 GHz, along with 3 MB of L2 cache and 8 MB of L3 cache.

Geekbench does not tell us anything about the GPU in the Ryzen 5 5500U, but we expect it to be clocked at 1.8 GHz, 300 MHz higher than the GPUs in the Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 5 4600U.

Unsurprisingly, the single-core score of the Ryzen 5 5500U is within a margin of error of the Ryzen 5 4500U. We have not reviewed a device with a Ryzen 5 4600U, but enabling SMT on the Ryzen 5 5500U appears to give it a 30% lead over the Ryzen 5 4500U in the multi-core portion of Geekbench 5.

However, the Ryzen 5 5500U does not stand up well against the Core i5-1135G7. Its single-core is around 20% down on what the Core i5-1135G7 has averaged in our tests, while the additional two cores and four threads only add 12% in performance. The Ryzen 5 5600U will be a more impressive APU though, as AMD is expected to have based it on Zen 3 (Cezanne) cores. The Ryzen 3 5400U and Ryzen 7 5800U are thought to be using AMD's upcoming Zen 3 cores, too. The Ryzen 5000 series is expected to debut at CES 2021 in January.