AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U Linux Performance

For those looking at upgrading your business notebook this holiday season, here are our first benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U mobile processor under Linux using a Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2. For ~$1299 USD this holiday season on sale, this Linux-friendly ThinkPad offers a lot with the 8-core / 16-thread Zen 3 processor with Vega graphics, 32GB LPDDR4X 4266MHz system memory, 1TB NVMe SSD, 4K IPS display, and legendary ThinkPad build quality.

While the AMD Ryzen 6000 "Rembrandt" processors are expected in the coming months with Zen 3+. Zen 3 mobile APUs are widespread these days. While I hadn't planned on upgrading my main production system/laptop to Cezanne given what's on the road-map for 2022 and after not finding any compelling laptop options readily available when Cezanne first appeared, Lenovo has been oferring some surprisingly aggressive holiday sales.

I ended up pocking up the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2 (20XF004WUS) as my new production laptop for just $1299 USD with the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U, 32GB of LPDDR4X 4266MHz memory (soldered, but at least 32GB is sufficient for a year), 1TB of storage, and 4K IPS display. This is my first AMD-powered ThinkPad and it's been working out very well throughout my Linux use this month. A newer kernel/distribution is needed for working WiFi support and there are some suspend/resume issues on older kernels, but it's been working out decent on the likes of Ubuntu 21.10. The ThinkPad T14s Gen2 build quality is as good as former ThinkPad laptops I've used over the years.

The AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5880U features eight Zen 3 cores with SMT to provide for 16 threads, a 1.9GHz base clock. 4.4GHz maximum boost clock, 4MB of L2 cache, and 16MB of L3 cache. The Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U has a 15 Watt default TDP.

Plus with all of the Lenovo contributions to the Linux kernel recently around ACPI Platform Profile support and numerous other features along with their collaborations with Red Hat on further improving the Linux desktop support, it was worthwhile picking up the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2 for checking out the Linux experience. Lenovo has been expanding the number of models they offer Linux pre-loads on, but in this case the device was pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows 10 Pro (in a follow-up article will be some Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks on this laptop).

The Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2 with Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U has been working out well with the latest Linux kernel on modern distributions. In this article the benchmarks were carried out on Ubuntu 21.10 across all the Intel / AMD laptops under test. Several follow-up articles looking at other areas of the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U / ThinkPad T14s Gen2a will be forthcoming on Phoronix. For now let's take a look at the overall performance.