With the recent release of Ubuntu 25.10 we have seen some nice performance improvements on the likes of AMD Zen 5 and Intel Lunar Lake compared to prior Ubuntu releases. But what about ARM? In this article is a look at the Ampere Altra performance between Ubuntu 25.04 and Ubuntu 25.10 using the popular System76 Thelio Astra workstation.
The Thelio Astra continues to be one of the most interesting ARM64 Linux workstations on the market even though the Ampere Altra processors are now five years old. AmpereOne remains largely elusive and there hasn’t been any new System76 workstation for AmpereOne or much in the enthusiast segment yet either. But even with Ampere Altra being a very mature platform at this point, Ubuntu 25.10 was bringing a rare enhancement but overall flat performance.
Using the System76 Thelio Astra with Ampere Altra Max 128-cores at 3.0GHz (Ampere Altra M128-30) and 8 x 32GB DDR4-3200 memory and NVIDIA RTX A400 graphics, Ubuntu 25.04 and Ubuntu 25.10 were compared with out-of-the-box/clean installations. Since Ubuntu 25.04 there has been the nice ARM64 Ubuntu Desktop ISOs that make for a very pleasant experience installing the Ubuntu desktop on compatible ARM64 devices.
Like with the x86_64 builds, moving from Ubuntu 25.04 to Ubuntu 25.10 on ARM64 means going from Linux 6.14 to Linux 6.17, GNOME 49 to GNOME 49 desktops, and GCC 15.2 replacing GCC 14.2 as the default code compiler. Plus minor updates to OpenJDK, Python, and numerous other packages over the past half-year.
