AMD Ryzen 7 2700U vs AMD Ryzen 5 3550H

AMD Ryzen 7 2700U

The AMD Ryzen 7 2700U is a mobile SoC that was announced in October 2017. It combines four Zen cores (8 threads) clocked at 2.2 - 3.8 GHz with a Radeon RX Vega 10 graphics card with 10 CUs (640 Shaders) clocked at up to 1300 MHz. The TDP can be configured by the laptop manufacturer between 12 to 25 Watt (15 Watt nominal) and therefore the APU is also suited for thin and light laptops. The integrated dual-channel memory controller supports up to DDR4-2400 memory. More information on Raven Ridge can be found in our launch article.

The performance of the Zen CPU cores should be better than a high end Kaby-Lake-Refresh Quad-Core CPU (e.g. the Core i7-8650U) according to AMD. Therefore, the Ryzen 7 2700U is suited for all applications.

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.