AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U "Rembrandt" Linux Laptop Benchmarks

In the end more than 200 benchmarks were carried out on the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U and other laptops under test. If wishing to see all 200+ benchmark results along with associated performance-per-Watt and individual CPU temperature and CPU power consumption metrics, visit this OpenBenchmarking.org result page for my massive set of data.

When taking the geometric mean of all these raw Linux performance benchmarks combined, the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U squeezed past the Core i7 1280P. Overall the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U was about 3% faster than the Core i7 1280P but largely comes down to what workloads are most important for you for whether Alder Lake or Rembrandt makes more sense -- and how important power efficiency is to your laptop use. Overall the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U with ThinkPad X13 Gen3 was about 5% faster than the HP Dev One with the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U.

It's with the CPU power consumption where the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U becomes much more compelling. Above is a look at the CPU power consumption over the entire span of benchmarks conducted. The Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U with the Linux 5.18 kernel had a 18.4 Watt average (or 16.6 Watt average with Linux 5.19 Git) while the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U average on Linux 5.18 was up at 21.96 Watts. The peak power consumption of the 5850U during testing was 47 Watts compared to 41 Watts with the 6850U or even down to 35 Watts with Linux 5.19 Meanwhile the Core i7 1280P had a 35 Watt average on Linux 5.18 and a peak of 107 Watts... It's with Linux 5.19 Git where the Intel Idle driver support is there that Alder Lake looks better in the power efficiency department but still behind the Zen 3/3+ parts tested. On Linux 5.19 the i7-1280P had a 30 Watt average and a peak of 75 Watts.

The Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U CPU core temperature in the ThinkPad X13 Gen3 during the entire span of benchmarks was 69 degrees compared to the 5850U having an average of 81 degrees. The Core i7 1280P in the MSI Evo notebook had an average core temperature of about 67 degrees.

The AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U in most benchmarks was only slightly faster than the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U, but its power efficiency with Zen 3+ tended to be much better. It was a nice improvement in performance-per-Watt with Rembrandt and further extends the AMD power efficiency wins over Intel Alder Lake P. In addition to the power efficiency, most compelling with the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U on Linux were the RDNA2-based Radeon 680M graphics as a big upgrade over Vega graphics. Stay tuned for a follow-up article shortly looking at the Radeon 680M Linux graphics performance over many more benchmarks. I'll also be evaluating the performance in different ACPI platform profile modes and more.