To be honest we were pretty disappointed by these findings, especially when comparing them to the ThinkPad E495 with the Ryzen 5 3500U consumer-grade processor, and we were able to identify two culprits for the ThinkPad T495’s degraded performance. First of all, there seem to be quality differences between the two chips. We cannot say whether we received a particularly good copy of the Ryzen 5 or a particularly bad copy of the Ryzen 5 Pro but regardless, both devices were regular retail products that everybody could have ended up with. The same is obviously also true for Intel CPUs.

The Ryzen 5 3500U in aforementioned ThinkPad E495 ran at 4x 3.0-3.1 GHz while transforming 25 W of energy into heat. The T495’s Ryzen 5 Pro 3500U ran only at 4x 2.8-2.9 GHz. This may be due to yet another difference in the TDP configuration. In addition to short- and long-term power consumption AMD processors also use another thermal threshold called STAPM, which stands for “skin temperature aware power management”. This setting is supposed to prevent overly hot surface temperatures. Think of this as a big jar that keeps on filling up continuously under load until it reaches its specified limit. For the T495, this limit is set to 22 W and reached after the fourth run of CineBench R15 multi-thread. Only then does this STAPM limit take effect and throttle the CPU to 22 W. Now let us take a look at the ThinkPad E495. It, too, has a STAPM thermal limit. However, unlike the T495’s the E495’s is set to 25 W and thus coincides with the processor’s long-term TDP limit. Accordingly, we did not notice a sudden performance drop during our CineBench R15 multi-thread loop.