AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500 Review: Firing Back at Alder Lake

AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500 Application Benchmarks — The TLDR

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We can boil down productivity application performance into two broad categories: single- and multi-threaded. These slides show the geometric mean of performance in several of our most important tests in each category, but be sure to look at the expanded benchmark results further below. 

The Alder Lake chips lead by healthy margins in our cumulative measurement of single-threaded performance, with the Core i5-12400 being 14.6% faster than the Ryzen 5 5600 at stock settings, and 10% faster after we tune both chips. Meanwhile, the stock Core i3-12100 is 19% faster than the Ryzen 5 5500, and overclocking the latter does little to rectify the disparity. You'll have to look to Intel's own Alder Lake family for faster single-threaded performance. 

Turning to threaded applications, the Core i5-12400 is 2.8% faster than the Ryzen 5 5600 at stock settings, and 5.5% faster after tuning. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 5 5500 is 19% faster than the Core i3-12100 in threaded work, and that increases to 23% after overclocking.

Rendering Benchmarks on AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500

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The Core i3-12100 is impressive in single-threaded rendering work, leading all competing Ryzen chips in both Cinebench and POV-Ray benchmarks, but its quad-core design isn't well suited for the heavily parallelized rendering workloads that you'll see in the real world. 

The Core i5-12400 is a closer match for the Ryzen 5 5600 in the threaded benchmarks, but the Intel chip often trails only by a slight amount or leads convincingly. Paired with its absolute dominance in lightly-threaded rendering, the Core i5-12400 is the better all-rounder for this type of work. 

Encoding Benchmarks on AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500

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Encoders can be either heavily threaded or almost exclusively single-threaded — there certainly doesn't seem to be a middle ground.

The HandBrake transcoder is heavily threaded and uses AVX instructions to boost performance, with the x265 version featuring a heavier distribution of SIMD instructions than the x264 version. The Core i5-12400 and the Ryzen 5 5600 are closely matched in x265, which naturally plays to Intel's strength in AVX work, but the 5600 pulls ahead slightly in x264. 

Turning to the single-threaded LAME benchmark finds the Intel processors leveraging their generally higher IPC and clock rates to take the lead, while the Ryzen 5 5600 takes the lead in the FLAC encoder.

Overall, you'll find the 12400 or the 5600 jockeying for the lead in this selection of workloads, but the Ryzen 5 5500 easily beats the Core i3-12100 due to its higher core and thread count. 

Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Lightroom on AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500

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We've integrated the UL Benchmarks Procyon tests into our suite to replace the aging PCMark 10. This new benchmark runs complex Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Lightroom workflows with the actual software, making for a great real-world test suite.

Web Browsing, Office and Productivity on AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500

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The ubiquitous web browser is one of the most frequently used applications. These tests tend to be lightly threaded, so a snappy response time is critical. We're accustomed to the Alder Lake chips running the table over competing Ryzen chips in the web browser tests, but the Ryzen 5 5600 is competitive. 

Compilation, Compression, AVX Benchmarks on AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500

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This section includes a diverse set of workloads, including exceedingly branchy code in the LLVM compilation workload and the massively parallel molecular dynamics simulation code in NAMD. The Core i3-12100 isn't very potent in these heavily-threaded applications, but the Core i5-12400 leads many of the benchmarks. Notably, the Ryzen 5 5600 does well in the NAMD workload due to its healthy slab of L2 cache. AMD benefits in the SHA3, AES, and HASH benchmarks from its cryptographic optimizations. That said, most of these types of workloads in this section aren't well-suited for this class of chip, but we include them as a reference.

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