Last week Canonical announced Ubuntu “architecture variants” with initially supporting “amd64v3” optimized packages built using the x86_64-v3 micro-architecture feature level. For this initial debut in the Ubuntu 25.10 archive an initial subset of packages are built using that higher feature level that can assume AVX/AVX2 and other more recent CPU ISA additions. More details on that and some initial desktop benchmarks can be found within the Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 Benchmarks article. Complementing that are some Ubuntu Server 25.10 benchmarks carried out on an AMD EPYC “Turin” server of the base amd64 packages versus amd64v3.
Following the Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 packages debut last week and the desktop testing, I carried out some comparison benchmarks of Ubuntu Server 25.10 on a clean install versus with upgrading to the available amd64v3 packages.
The same AMD EPYC 9965 2P server was used for all the testing with the only difference between runs being switching over and upgrading to the Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 architecture variant.
Like with the desktop testing, the Ubuntu Server results on this 5th Gen AMD EPYC “Turin” server were mixed. But at least for some workloads it’s already showing positive signs. It will be very interesting to see with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS when more of the archive is built out for amd64v3 and whether Canonical also pursues an “amd64v4” variant for AVX-512 assumptions, etc.
Code compilation tests were faster on this AMD EPYC server when upgrading to the Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 packages.
Some of the OpenJDK Java benchmarks were also faster with Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3.
Nginx from the Ubuntu 25.10 archive also was coming in slightly faster.
For the most part though the differences were quite small when running Ubuntu Server 25.10 with amd64v3 packages on this AMD EPYC server compared to the Ubuntu 25.10 baseline. Given the lofty capabilities of the AMD EPYC 9005 series processors, having an “amd64v3” option with AVX-512 and the like would likely be more interesting for the compute intensive workloads. In any event it’s great to see Canonical continuing to invest in more performance optimizations and will be interesting to see what they pursue for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS in April.
