Cinebench is one of the strongest results for the Ryzen 5 2500U. In the multi-threaded test, the CPU was just slightly slower than the Core i7-8550U, and let’s not forget the i7-8550U is a higher-tier product than the Ryzen 5 2500U. The Ryzen 7 2700U is clocked 5 to 10 percent higher, and no doubt would beat the i7-8550U in this test. If you’ve been following Ryzen desktop coverage, the single-threaded result won’t surprise you: the i7-8550U is a good 17 percent faster here. Interestingly, on a clock for clock basis, the 8550U is clocked 11 percent higher in single-core workloads, so read into that what you want.
Encoding x264 videos is a tougher task for the Ryzen 5 2500U. In the first pass, the 8550U is a huge 38 percent faster, though strangely this margin is narrowed significantly in the second pass to just 3 percent.
And it gets even tougher in x265 encoding, where Intel’s 8th-generation parts hold a commanding lead. The 8550U is a good 23 percent faster in this workload, encoding the hour long test video in an hour and a half compared to two hours for Ryzen.
