Canonical today announced an exciting step forward for Ubuntu Linux: the notion of architecture variants and now initially providing an Ubuntu 25.10 archive with x86_64-v3 built packages for enjoying better performance on modern Intel and AMD hardware.
With changes to dpkg, Apt, and Launchpad, Ubuntu Linux now has support to build multiple versions of a package. At the moment, around 2000 source packages of Ubuntu main have been rebuilt for x86_64-v3. The hope is for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS to have all packages built for an x86_64-v3 variant.
The x86_64-v3 micro-archtecture feature level allows making the assumption over AVX and AVX2 processor support. Plus other ISA features like BMI1/BMI2, FMA, MOVBE, and others. The x86_64-v3 feature level is roughly supported by Intel Haswell CPUs and newer or AMD Excavator processors and later. It’s x86_64-v4 where things really get exciting with AVX-512. Ubuntu is referring to their x86_64-v3 variant as amd64v3.
More details on this Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 architecture variant via the Ubuntu Discourse along with details on how to upgrade your Ubuntu 25.10 system to the amd64v3 packages. I will be running some comparison Ubuntu 25.10 benchmarks soon for showing how the performance can be impacted from these better optimized packages.
