AMD Athlon II X3 425 On Linux

While the Phenom II X3 was clocked 100MHz slower than the Athlon II X3 425 at their default frequencies, the Kuma processor was still no match to the Heka-based Phenom II. Even when the Athlon II X3 425 was pushed to 3.4GHz, it still did not have enough to outperform the Phenom II X3 710 with the Apache web server benchmark. This is likely due to the presence of the L3 cache and other fundamental advantages of the Phenom II over the Athlon II series. The Athlon II X3 425 was a better performer than the original quad-core Phenom 9500 processor clocked at 2.20GHz.

With 7-Zip compression the Phenom II X3 710 still managed to have a slight lead over the Athlon II X3 425 even when there was the 2.6GHz vs. 2.7GHz clock difference, but the Kuma product performed much better than it did in Apache. The easy overclock to 3.4GHz with the Athlon II X3 425 was also able to provide a nice speed advantage in the 7-Zip test.

Again, the Phenom II X3 710 was a strong winner over the Athlon II X3 425 until we started giving the Athlon II X3 the frequency advantage.

With LAME MP3 encoding, to some surprise, the Phenom II X3 architecture was not of any greater benefit over the Athlon II X3.