AMD Ryzen 5 5500 Linux Performance

Over the past few days since receiving the Ryzen 5 5500 review sample from AMD, I've been benchmarking it under a variety of workloads. The processors recently re-tested for this fresh Linux CPU comparison (based on the CPUs I have readily available) included:

- Core i3 10100
- Core i5 10600K
- Core i5 11600K
- Core i5 12400
- Core i5 12600K
- Core i9 12900K
- Ryzen 3 3100
- Ryzen 3 3300X
- Ryzen 5 2400G
- Ryzen 5 5500
- Ryzen 5 5600G
- Ryzen 7 5700G
- Ryzen 9 5950X

All processors were tested on Ubuntu 21.10 with the Linux 5.16 kernel. The AMD Ryzen 5 5500 was tested with the Gigabyte A520M DS3H given the budget-minded focus of this processor along with the other common test components across processors of 2 x 8GB Corsair DDR4-3600 memory and 1TB WD_BLACK SN850. This initial review is looking just at the general Linux CPU performance while gaming tests will come in a separate article.

For six cores / twelve threads at ~$159 USD, the Ryzen 5 5500 Zen 3 processor is a decent mid-range contender. The Ryzen 5 5500 was generally coming in between the Core i5 10600K and Core i5 11660K for raw performance and in some workloads inline with the Core i5 12400 Alder Lake processor.

The Ryzen 5 5500 was consistently consuming less power than the tested Intel CPUs.

For purely single-threaded workloads like JSON parsing, the Intel Alder Lake processors still had a measurable lead over the Zen 3 parts. The smaller (16MB) L3 cache with the Ryzen 5 5500 did hurt its potential in some workloads.

For performance-per-Watt the Ryzen 5 5500 had a strong showing across all of the testing.