AMD Ryzen 7 2700U vs Intel Core i7-8550U – new competition arrives

Last year was a memorable one for the CPU market. We witnessed the big comeback of a brand that was once on the top – AMD. The company’s new Zen architecture proved itself to be worth your while.

Later, AMD announced its Raven Ridge mobile APUs that combine a Ryzen CPU and a Vega integrated graphics card. The two available models – Ryzen 7 2700U and Ryzen 5 2500U can already be found on the market and its time to see how the new competition stacks to the established king of the market – Intel.

Today we will take a look at a comparison between the new AMD Ryzen 7 2700U and the Kaby Lake-Refresh Intel Core i7-8550U.

Check out our Top Laptop CPU Ranking to see how the two models stack against others.

Specs overview

When it comes to raw specs, the digits of both processors are very similar. They are both built on a 14nm manufacturing process and both go easy on the battery with their low average TDP of 15W. Cache amount is where the Core i7-8550U has an advantage as it sports 8MB while the Ryzen 7 2700U is stuck with 6MB – 4MB of which is L3.

Despite the low power draw, both processors feature four physical cores and another four logical ones for a total of eight threads. The two models also share similar frequencies, however, the Ryzen 7 2700U starts a bit higher at 2.20GHz versus 1.80GHz on the Core i7-8550U but things take a 180-degree turn when it comes to the maximum clock where the Intel counterpart reaches 4.00GHz compared to 3.80GHz on the Ryzen 7.

Furthermore, we see more similarities – both processors support the SSE 4.2 and AVX2 instructions sets and both feature dual-channel memory with up to 2400Mhz clock.

One interesting feature of the Ryzen 7 2700U is the integrated Radeon RX Vega 10 graphics chip which has its own ten cores with a max frequency of 1300MHz. The APU’s performance is an interesting topic that we will cover in a separate article.

You can check out the full specs of the Core i7-8550U and the Ryzen 7 2700U.

Benchmarks

Results are from the Cinebench 20 CPU test (the higher the score, the better)

Results are from our Photoshop benchmark test (the lower the score, the better)

Results are from the Fritz chess benchmark (the higher the score, the better)

As you can see from the charts above, both the real-life performance like 3D rendering (tested with Cinebench 15) and Adobe Photoshop and the raw synthetic benchmarks (tested with Fritz)nearly identical.

The new competitor – Ryzen 7 2700U – is usually just a couple or so percent behind its counterpart which is virtually indistinguishable when it comes to day-to-day use.

Conclusion

It seems that just like in the desktop market, AMD has managed to create a worthy opponent of Intel in the mobile segment too.

The two chips that we compared today, deliver mostly the same performance so your choice should be influenced by other criteria such as price, battery life, and GPU performance if that is important for you.

You can check all currently available notebooks equipped with the Core i7-8550U in our Laptops Specs system over HERE and all featuring the Ryzen 7 2700U over HERE.

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