Our first AMD Ryzen 5 3550H benchmarks are in and they give Intel's Core i5-8300H a run for their money

AMD has been hitting home runs with its Ryzen series. The original 2016 Zen family for laptops is comparable to Intel Kaby Lake-R and even the latest Whiskey Lake-U series while offering far superior integrated graphics performance than the dated UHD Graphics 620. At CES 2019, AMD finally announced a family of faster 35 W mobile Zen+ CPUs to compete against Intel's family of 45 W Kaby Lake-H and Coffee Lake-H CPUs commonly found on gaming laptops.

The first Zen+ CPU hit the market just last week as the Ryzen 5 3550H for the Asus TUF FX505DY budget gaming laptop. After putting it through our usual suite of benchmarks, we can conclude that AMD's new 12 nm processor is comparable to Inte's 14 nm Core i5-8300H in both single- and multi-threaded workloads. The average i5-8300H in our database taken from 17 different laptops scores 785 points in CineBench R15 Multi-Thread compared to 757 on our Ryzen-powered Asus laptop. Meanwhile, single-thread performance is slower on the AMD by about 10 percent. This is certainly still commendable given that the Ryzen 5 3550H operates under a tighter TDP budget than the Intel equivalent.

Performance throttling appears to be minimal as well. When running CineBench R15 Multi-Thread in a loop, we are only able to record a performance dip of just 5 percent over time

Intel's hexa-core Core i7-8750H will still handily outperform the quad-core Ryzen 5 3550H by as much as 60 percent in multi-threaded workloads. AMD has no plans for a 35 W hexa-core Zen+ CPU at the moment and so Intel will remain uncontested in the high-end gaming market.

We're hopeful that more future gaming laptops in the budget to mainstream category will consider the Ryzen 5 3550H in lieu of the Core i5-8300H. Not only would prices be lower, but raw CPU performance would be nearly the same.

Of course, our benchmarks below are only based on one laptop and so we cannot make any wide-reaching conclusions about the Ryzen 5 3550H just yet. Nonetheless, the initial numbers are very promising just like what we saw with the Ryzen 5 2500U and Ryzen 7 2700U. We'll continue to test more Zen-powered laptops as they trickle in. The proper "Zen 2" series is expected to launch before the end of this year that should offer even faster performance than the Zen+ series.

For more technical information and benchmarks on the AMD Ryzen 5 3550H, see our dedicated page here.