The Ryzen 5 3550U outscores the Ryzen 7 3700U and Ryzen 7 3750H in Geekbench, but lives in Intel's shadow

The Ryzen 5 3550U is shaping up to be an intriguing APU. AMD has not only seemingly integrated a new Radeon RX Vega GPU, but early indications suggest that it can also hold its own against more powerful Ryzen processors. According to a recent Geekbench listing, the Ryzen 5 3550U is another mobile quad-core APU, with it identifying as an "AMD Family 23 Model 24 Stepping 1", the same identifier that AMD uses for its other Ryzen 3000 series APUs. The Ryzen 5 3550U also supports simultaneous multithreading (SMT), allowing it to execute up to 8 threads at once, has 4 MB of L3 cache like the Ryzen 5 3500U and Ryzen 7 3700U.

Geekbench also reports that the Ryzen 5 3550U has a 2.1 GHz base clock and effectively a 3.7 GHz boost clock, putting it on par with the Ryzen 5 3500U. Given the similarities between the Ryzen 5 3550U and its Ryzen 3000 series siblings, we expect the APU to also have a 15 W thermal design power (TDP).

However, the Ryzen 5 3550U scored surprisingly well in Geekbench 4, with it performing more like a Ryzen 7 3750H than a Ryzen 5 3500U or Ryzen 7 3700U. The latter two, for instance, have generally scored 10,328 and 10,542 points in the multicore portion of Geekbench, with the Ryzen 5 3550U pulling around 15% clear of them both on 11,894 points. Moreover, the Ryzen 5 3550U scored 3,879 points in the single-core equivalent, 8% more than the Ryzen 5 3500U and just 36 points ahead of the Ryzen 7 3700U. By contrast, the Ryzen 5 3550U trails the Ryzen 7 3750H by 18 points in the single-core test but scores 4% more than its H series sibling in the multicore version.

While these scores put the Ryzen 5 3550U in a good light, the processor falls well short of the Intel Core i5-8265U in the same set of benchmarks. The latter averages around 15% more in both benchmarks than the Ryzen 5 3550U despite having the same core count and TDP. The Ryzen 5 3550U and RX Vega 9 offer considerably better graphics performance than the Core i5-8265U and its UHD Graphics 620 though, so do not write the former off just because of its processor performance. There is currently no word on when the Ryzen 5 3550U will make its debut, but we expect it to do so before the end of the year.