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

[GreatEmerald]

Yea, I have a Phenom II X4 that's been relegated to a backup NAS server, but I'm going to swap it out with an older workstation system with a weaker processor (Core 2 right now) to give the latter a boost in performance and the former slightly lower power consumption. The problem is that the Core 2 board doesn't appear to support wake-on-LAN that well, whereas the Phenom board did that just fine...

[Apopas]

I remember back in Athlon and Pentium 3 days and before, each upgrade was significant. Now each year we have 10% improvement to the speed. That's why I'm not thinking to upgrade my Haswell system any time soon.
Very interesting benchmarks. Thank you, Michael!

[smartalgorithm]

mmm, can someone combine core i3 2100 and ryzen 3 on openbenchamrking.org and share here? thanks!

[coder]

Another Phenom II (X2)-based NAS owner, here.

I sort of wish the benchmarks were done with all but one core disabled. Then, it would be a pure core efficiency metric. Oh well.

Phenom II + my 890 FX board had all those juicy PCIe lanes + SATA 3 + ECC w/ patrol scrub! Perfect budget server platform. As I don't leave it turned on most of the time (it now holds backups), the power consumption doesn't bother me. Running ext4 on RAID 6 via mdraid is still multiple times faster than gigabit ethernet.

Yet, as the HDDs are at the end of their warranty period, the day draws near when I rebuild with bigger disks. I'm really tempted to go with Ryzen, but it would ideally be an APU version (with ECC support). I'll be sad to see it go. Looking forward to 10 gig ethernet, though... or at least 2.5.

[leipero]

If it seems to keep up with your workload without much effort, you could try under-volting it, and maybe do a slight underclock if it helps decrease the voltage enough. I have an Athlon II x3 where I dropped the voltage by about 0.2v, which is pretty significant. Even with the crappy stock heatsink and no thermal paste, it manages to stay below 65C under full load, and drops to around 30C when idle. From what I recall, the whole system uses around 50W when idle, using a watt meter. Not great, but not bad for such an old system either.

Yeah, back in 2009 I've undervolted my Athlon II x2 240 from Auto (1.4v) to 1.25, it was low TDP anyway (65W), but that made it much cooler. FX by far was the best for undervolting from CPU's I have, from Auto (~1.385v) to 1.165v, what was the (socket) idle temperature with stock cooler turned out to be a bit higher max temperature under 100% load lol.

[ssokolow]

Appealing... but given how my upgrades are always driven by the desire to start buying new types of console games to dump and emulate, and performance per thread is still the main concern there, I'll probably buy a pre-PSP chip when this one gives out and then start saving for an Intel CPU with 2 or 3 cores that I can put on the same quarantined subnet I use for my WinXP and Win311/Win98 retro-PCs.

[Michael_S]

I remember back in Athlon and Pentium 3 days and before, each upgrade was significant. Now each year we have 10% improvement to the speed. That's why I'm not thinking to upgrade my Haswell system any time soon.
Very interesting benchmarks. Thank you, Michael!

I have mixed feelings too. My own current processors are old AMD ones, though not quite this old or low end. So I would get on the order of a 50% single-threaded performance boost with an upgrade.

On one hand, 50% is huge. But on the other... 0 A.D. runs fine on my current hardware and I haven't played anything else in years. Firefox 56 and 57 nightly upgrade Firefox to 'not suck' status, so browsing the web is pleasant without needing to run Chrome. When I rip movies, I set the process to run overnight so I don't care how long it takes.

I'm inclined to just run what I have until it breaks.

[schmidtbag]

I have mixed feelings too. My own current processors are old AMD ones, though not quite this old or low end. So I would get on the order of a 50% single-threaded performance boost with an upgrade.

On one hand, 50% is huge. But on the other... 0 A.D. runs fine on my current hardware and I haven't played anything else in years. Firefox 56 and 57 nightly upgrade Firefox to 'not suck' status, so browsing the web is pleasant without needing to run Chrome. When I rip movies, I set the process to run overnight so I don't care how long it takes.

I'm inclined to just run what I have until it breaks.

Not everything comes down to performance. Sometimes power efficiency, physical size, and noise become more important and will save you more money in the end. In other words, a Ryzen 1200 is a very cheap product and will save you money over what you use now in electricity (and in turn, cooling during the summer).

[onicsis]

How long it would take a complete operation, like apt-build world (or emerge --update --deep --with-bdeps=y @world, or equivalent), for rebuilding an entire distribution on a Ryzen 3 system.

[torsionbar28]

I have mixed feelings too. My own current processors are old AMD ones, though not quite this old or low end. So I would get on the order of a 50% single-threaded performance boost with an upgrade.

On one hand, 50% is huge. But on the other... 0 A.D. runs fine on my current hardware and I haven't played anything else in years. Firefox 56 and 57 nightly upgrade Firefox to 'not suck' status, so browsing the web is pleasant without needing to run Chrome. When I rip movies, I set the process to run overnight so I don't care how long it takes.

I'm inclined to just run what I have until it breaks.

I had not heard of 0 A.D. before, just looked it up and I intend to start playing it, so thanks for that.

Agreed on the whole upgrade merry-go-round, the mere fact that something newer and better exists is not reason enough to upgrade. The Opteron 4386 w/ 16 GB of ECC DDR3-1600 that I'm typing this on, delivers rock solid reliability and perfectly adequate performance in everything I do on a daily basis.

But some folks have cash to burn I suppose, and new peecee hardware is their preferred mode of burning it, so good for them.