AMD Ryzen 5 5500 Linux Performance

AMD on Monday began shipping the Ryzen 5 5500 as a ~$159 USD processor in the Zen 3 family. The Ryzen 5 5500 offers 6 cores / 12 threads with a 65 Watt TDP rating in making for a fairly robust offering for its low price point. I've had the Ryzen 5 5500 in the lab the past few days and in this article are some initial benchmarks seeing how this mid-range processor performs.

The AMD Ryzen 5 5500 has 6 cores / 12 threads with a 3.6GHz base clock and a 4.2GHz maximum boost clock frequency while having a 16MB L3 cache. This CPU has a 65 Watt rating and is manufactured on the TSMC 7nm process like other Zen 3 parts. A notable difference with this model though is the Ryzen 5 5500 only supporting PCI Express Gen 3 unlike PCIe Gen 4 with the higher-end parts. The Ryzen 5 5500 was announced last month alongside other Ryzen parts including the Zen 2 based Ryzen 3 4100 and Ryzen 5 4500 -- for now the Ryzen 5 5500 is the lowest-end Zen 3 SKU available.

At the $159 price point, the Ryzen 5 5500 does include AMD's Wraith Stealth heatsink fan for retail units. With older AM4 motherboards seeing BIOS updates for enabling Ryzen 5000 series support, the Ryzen 5 5500 does present itself as a value-oriented upgrade option for those looking for a modest upgrade from older Ryzen processors.

To little surprise given the maturity of the Ryzen 5000 series and AM4 platforms, the Ryzen 5500 presented no Linux compatibility issues. This 6c/12t processor should work fine on any modern Linux distribution without issue.