AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U "Rembrandt" Linux Laptop Benchmarks
I've begun testing the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U "Rembrandt" SoC under Linux and have some preliminary benchmarks of this Zen 3+ chip up against a variety of Intel and AMD notebooks on hand. Here is the first of several articles looking at the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U Linux performance using a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen3.
The AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U is one of the recently launched Rembrandt SoCs. The Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U is 8 cores / 16 threads like the prior Cezanne Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U but now with a 2.7GHz base clock and 4.7GHz maximum boost clock compared to 1.9GHz base clock and 4.4GHz boost clock with the prior generation part. The Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U has a 15 to 28 Watt configurable TDP and this Zen 3+ processor is manufactured on a TSMC 6nm FinFET process compared to TSMC 7nm FinFET with the former Cezanne Zen 3 models.
The Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U also now supports DDR4-4800 / LPDDR5-6400 memory compared to DDR4/LPDDR4 with the Cezanne models. Arguably most exciting with the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U is the Radeon 680M graphics that are based on RDNA2 rather than the long used Radeon Vega graphics with prior AMD APUs. The RDNA2 graphics provide much uplift for the Linux graphics capabilities with this notebook chip and this article offers a glimpse at the potential while more Radeon 680M Linux tests are forthcoming.
My Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U Linux testing has been happening using a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen3 (21CM0001US) that features 16GB of LPDDR5-6400 (soldered) memory, 512GB NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD, 13.3-inch 1920 x 1200 IPS 300 nit display, and makes use of the integrated Radeon 680M graphics. It's a nice laptop and all basic functionality works out under Linux while more on the laptop itself under Linux will be talked about in the forthcoming ThinkPad X13 Gen 3 Linux review.
The laptops/processors used for this initial round of AMD Rembrandt Linux benchmarking included:
- Core i7 8565U - Dell XPS 13 9380
- Core i7 1065G7 - Dell XPS 13 7390
- Core i7 1185G7 - Dell XPS 13 9310
- Core i7 1280P - MSI MS-14C6
- Core i7 1280P - MSI MS-14C6 + 5.19-rc7
- Ryzen 7 4700U - Lenovo LNVNB161216
- Ryzen 5 5500U - TUXEDO Aura 15 Gen2
- Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U - HP Dev One
- Ryzen 9 5900HX - ASUS G513QY
- Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U - ThinkPad X13 Gen3
- Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U - ThinkPad X13 Gen3 + 5.19-rc7
The selection of hardware was obviously limited by the laptops I had on hand for fresh (re)testing under Linux. All of these laptops were tested on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS using the Linux 5.18 kernel.
Due to seeing improved power efficiency for Alder Lake P with Linux 5.19, the Core i7 1280P was tested both using Linux 5.18 like the other laptops and again with Linux 5.19-rc7. So, similarly, the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U was tested also with Linux 5.18 and 5.19-rc7.
More than 200 benchmarks of these laptops were carried out under Ubuntu Linux while also monitoring the CPU power consumption and core temperature on a per-test basis.