AMD Ryzen 7 2700U vs Intel Core i5-8250U – the rival is back

Yesterday, we published the comparison between the new AMD Ryzen 7 2700U and the well-known Intel Core i7-8550U. We saw that these two chips were quite similar in terms of specs and almost identical when it comes to performance.

With that said it is only normal to suggest that the new Raven Ridge APU will beat the less powerful Intel Core i5-8250U but you might like to find out just how much of a difference there is.

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

Specs overview

Just like the Core i7-8550U, the Core i5-8250U has a very similar configuration to the Ryzen 7 2700U. Both chips are built on the 14nm manufacturing process and have a low power draw of 15W. In both chips, the TDP varies from 10W (12W for the 2700U) up to 25W.

Both processors feature four physical cores and a total of eight threads thanks to the Hyper-Threading and SMT technologies on Intel’s and AMD’s side respectively. While the Core i7-8550U has similar clocks compared to the Ryzen 7 2700U, the Core i5-8250U that we are taking a look at today falls behind. Its base frequency is just 1.60GHz opposed to 2.20GHz on the Ryzen 7. Same goes for maximum boost clocks which are 3.40GHz and 3.80GHz respectively.

Cache levels on both chips are 6MB although just 4MB are L3 cache on the Ryzen 7 2700U. Other than that, there aren’t many differences left. Both platforms support dual-channel DDR4 memory up to 2400MHz and feature all the necessary instructions sets including SSE 4.2 and AVX2.

For those of you who have not already heard, the new Raven Ridge platform combines Ryzen processor architecture with Vega graphics. We won’t get into the specs of the integrated GPUs of both processors but stay tuned for an upcoming analysis of the performance of the integrated RX Vega.

You can check out Ryzen 7 2700U’s specs page for detailed information about the Vega GPU and the Core i5-8250U’s page for the UHD 620’s specs.

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)

Despite the overall higher clock speed of the Ryzen 7 2700U, the two almost identical CPUs score very similarly in the actual test. Yes, the Ryzen 7 2700U outperforms the Core i5-8250U but it is not that further ahead.

The only actual performance boot is when it comes to 3D Rendering which we represent using the Cinebench 15 test. The Ryzen 7 2700U score 609 points compared to 531 points which result in a 7.2% bump. Our Adobe Photoshop test shows that the Ryzen 7 2700U finishes the task about two seconds faster than the Core i5-8250U which is about a fifth faster.

Raw performance measured by Fritz just continues the trend with a 6.6% bump in favor of the Ryzen 7 2700U.

Conclusion

Judging by the graphs above, the two processors are fairly equally powerful. The Ryzen 7 2700U is generally better and faster but not too much and it is only shown when rendering. When we take the price into consideration, one can doubt the benefits of the Ryzen 7 2700U because the notebook equipped with it are more expensive at the moment.

On the other hand, it is a great new alternative to the Intel chips and it also features an integrated RX Vega GPU which we expect to perform better than the UHD 620.

Check out all currently available Intel Core i5-8250U notebooks HERE and all AMD Ryzen 7 2700U notebook over HERE.

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Kevin Matney
6 years ago

You should download the Intel Extreme Tuning software, undervolt the 8250u by 0.09V or 0.1V, and run the Cinebench test again. My 8250u scores above 650 when I do that, I also undervoltage the graphics voltage by -0.04 V, which i think alsio helps keeps the overall package cooler. Without undervolting, my score is about 550. I do like the integrated graphics in the Ryzan cpus.

Stefanos
Stefanos
5 years ago
Reply to  Kevin Matney

I downloaded intel extreme utility to my xiaomi mi notebook pro and i can’t undervolt my cpu which is i5 8250u