Athlon II X3 vs. Ryzen 3: How AMD's Performance Has Evolved & Performance-Per-Watt

First up was a basic benchmark via tjbench bundled with the JPEG library libjpeg-turbo. Going from the Athlon II X3 425 to Ryzen 3 1200 was a 1.79x improvement while going to the 1300X yielded a 2.0x improvement. This is over the course of eight years of AMD CPUs on their low-end spectrum.

The performance-per-Watt results for this test were even more striking though with going from Rana to Zen being a 2.56x improvement or 2.94x on the 1300X model.

And torturing the Athlon II X3 425 a bit with HPC Challenge....

The performance-per-Watt improvements are as noticeable as the raw performance.

Even the SQLite performance for this embedded database library widely used by Firefox, Thunderbird, and many other desktop applications saw greater performance with the system upgrade.

Or if doing greater I/O via PostgreSQL, the Ryzen 3 CPUs were a tremendous upgrade.

Where the performance-per-Watt is also multiple times better than the old Athlon II from the Phenom days.