Ryzen 5 5600U is putting pressure on Intel and its 11th gen Core series on midrange laptops

AMD has been slowly but surely eating away at Intel's market share in the laptop world and its latest Zen 3 microarchitecture shows no signs of slowing down. The performance advantages in particular are hard to ignore especially after benchmarking the Ryzen 5 5600U CPU as even this AMD midrange offering can outperform Intel's best on numerous occasions.

Based on our time with the Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro 14 running on a Ryzen 5 5600U, the 6-core AMD processor can offer anywhere between 70 to 100 percent faster multi-thread performance than the Core i7-1165G7, i7-1185G7, or even the i7-1195G7 according to CineBench benchmarks. Other applications dependent on multi-thread performance would subsequently favor the Ryzen 5 5600U by wide margins including HWBOT x265, 7-Zip, and Blender.

The performance delta can be mostly attributed to the differences in cores and threads between AMD and Intel U-series CPUs. Whereas the Ryzen 5 5600U integrates 6 cores and 12 threads (or even 8 cores and 16 threads on the Ryzen 7 5800U), the entire Intel 11th gen Core i7 U-series lineup is limited to 4 cores and 8 threads only. Benchmarks that don't depend on multi-thread CPU performance, such as single-thread operations or raw graphics, tend to favor Intel as a result. 3DMark and CineBench single-thread benchmarks for Intel are about 30 to 45 percent and 5 to 10 percent higher, respectively, when compared to the Ryzen 5 5600U.

If you're looking to maximize U-series processor performance, then an AMD model would be your best bet especially since they tend to retail for cheaper prices than Intel. On the other hand, users looking to maximize integrated graphics performance may want to consider an 11th gen Core i7 model instead. Intel no longer has the best of both worlds in this regard.