AMD Ryzen 5 5500U - Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 21.04 Linux Benchmarks

While yesterday was the Threadripper 3990X Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks, with recently picking up the $450 Lenovo IdeaPad 3 15 with Ryzen 5 5500U, prior to wiping the Windows 10 preload I ran some benchmarks to see how that default Microsoft Windows 10 Home installation compared to a fresh install of Ubuntu 21.04 for maximizing the performance potential of this budget six core / twelve thread laptop.

As some extra "Windows 10 vs. Linux" performance figures, this article has the benchmarks of the Windows 10 install as shipped by Lenovo compared to performing a clean install of Ubuntu 21.04. The Lenovo IdeaPad 3 (LNVNB161216) was equipped with the AMD Ryzen 5 5500U six core / twelve thread processor with Radeon Vega 7 graphics, 256GB Samsung NVMe SSD, 1080p display, and 2 x 4GB DDR4-3200 memory.

A wide variety of desktop/laptop oriented workloads were then run on this affordable AMD laptop.

Compared to the higher-end systems like yesterday's Ryzen Threadripper 3990X benchmarks where Linux tends to dominate, there are more mixed results on the lower-end CPU front. Windows 10 was picking up wins in some of the graphics/GPU tests and the web browser benchmarks. Those areas are of little surprise with Mozilla Firefox long performing better on Windows than Linux. The OpenGL/Vulkan performance is mixed depending upon the particular workload for how well it competes on the open-source Linux driver stack against AMD's Radeon Software Windows driver package. Ubuntu 21.04 tended to lead in the other CPU focused performance tests.