Simulation, Compression Benchmarks
Microsoft Excel is a short workload that favors high boost clocks. Here, Ryzen is also slower than Kaby Lake Refresh, to the tune of 27 percent. Again, this isn't a hugely surprising result considering the 8550U holds a clock speed advantage, and Intel's Kaby Lake architecture has higher IPC as we showed in our coverage of desktop Ryzen.
MATLAB is one of the worst results for Ryzen. In fact it's so bad I'm not quite sure what the reason for this performance delta is. The Ryzen 5 2500U is around twice as slow as the i7-8550U, slower than the very slow Skylake Core m3 CPU in our charts. Some of the workloads in the MATLAB benchmark fare worse than others - FFT and ODE are much more competitive - but it's still not a great overall result.
In WinRAR compression's multi-threaded workload, again the Intel Core i7-8550U performs strongly, posting a 52 percent lead here, though this does vary by device. Single-threaded results are better, reducing to a 27 percent margin.