AMD Ryzen 5 4500U Performance On Windows 10 vs. Six Linux Distributions

As part of our Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U Linux benchmarking there have been multiple requests for showing how various Linux distributions run and perform with these exciting Ryzen 4000 series mobile CPUs. Here are some benchmarks not only looking at six Linux distributions but also the performance of Microsoft Windows 10 as was preloaded on the Lenovo Flex 5 15-inch 2-in-1.

The Lenovo Flex 5 15-inch 2-in-1 laptop that I picked up for $599 USD was used for this round of testing. This laptop features the Ryzen 5 4500U 6-core CPU with Vega graphics, 16GB of dual channel memory, 256GB SSD, and 14-inch 1080p display. It's quite a nice budget laptop with very great performance for the price. The operating systems tested for this comparison included:

- Clear Linux 33390
- Fedora Workstation 32
- Manjaro Linux 20.0.3
- openSUSE Tumbleweed
- Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
- Ubuntu 20.10 Daily Snapshot
- Microsoft Windows 10

All of the Linux distributions loaded up on the Lenovo Flex 5 without any notable issues, with the sole exception being the Ubuntu releases. With Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (and 20.10 daily snapshots, for the moment) using an older Linux 5.4 kernel, the Renoir graphics aren't supported out of the box so in those cases I switched to a newer Linux 5.7 kernel with the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA. The other tested Linux distributions all have newer kernels to avoid this issue and had working accelerated graphics.

If you are on a new enough kernel, the overall experience of the Ryzen 5 4500U and Lenovo Flex 5 15-inch has been in good standing with my testing thus far. Via the Phoronix Test Suite I ran around 150 benchmarks on the different Linux distributions and Windows 10 for seeing how this six-core sub-$600 laptop performs.