AMD Ryzen 5 4500U Benchmarks - Previously Unimaginable Performance For Sub-$600 Laptops

Overall the Ryzen 5 4500U offers a fair amount of oomph for laptops in the sub-$600 range. The Lenovo Flex 5 with Ryzen 5 4500U, 16GB RAM in dual channel configuration, 1080p display, and 256GB NVMe SSD is a steal for the offering and backed by Lenovo's reliable build quality at $599 USD. But beyond that if your budget is even tighter the Ryzen 5 4500U is beginning to appear in ~$549 laptops but generally with 8GB of RAM (some models, single channel) and worse storage options.

When looking at the geometric mean for the tests that were run on all of the laptops / mobile CPUs under test for this particular article, the Ryzen 5 4500U was 23% faster than the Core i7 6700HQ found in an Apple MacBook Pro or 28% faster than the Intel Core i7 1065G7 Ice Lake. The Ryzen 7 4700U with its two extra cores offered up 16% greater performance than the 5600U in these particular benchmarks. Keep in mind the Ryzen 7 4700U isn't even at the top of the stack but there is the the Ryzen 4800/4900 series with up to sixteen threads for even greater performance -- though due to budget constraints it's unlikely I will be testing any of those models under Linux at this point.

The Vega-based graphics with Renoir are quite capable and easily blow the Gen9 Intel graphics out of the water and for many workloads faster than the Gen11 graphics on Linux found with the Ice Lake i7-1065G7.

Overall the Ryzen 5 4500U opens up budget laptops to greater performance. So far when using Ubuntu 20.04 with Linux 5.7 I am quite happy with the Lenovo Flex 5 as an affordable laptop offering tremendous value. If you are shopping among other Ryzen 5 4500U laptops, be aware some laptops may be using just single-channel memory or the likes, but at least as far as the laptop under test its numbers are quite compelling.

If you want to see how your own Linux laptop performance compares to these CPUs under test, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 2006013-NI-RYZEN450081 for all of the CPU benchmarks. Or run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 2006013-NI-RENOIRGFX03 for the graphics tests. Additional AMD Ryzen 5 4500U Linux testing and performance benchmarking will be coming up on Phoronix soon.