Benchmarking The Experimental Ubuntu x86-64-v3 Build For Greater Performance On Modern CPUs

One of the exciting innovations currently being explored by Canonical ahead of the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release is an x86-64-v3 build of the OS / packages. The x86-64-v3 micro-architecture feature level makes AVX/AVX2 support assumed by default as well as other modern x86_64 ISA features typically common of AMD and Intel processors the past number of years (with exceptions). Canonical's determination around what to do with a possible complementary Ubuntu x86-64-v3 build/archive is still being determined but they had released an experimental Ubuntu 23.04 based build that I decided to take for some benchmarking.

As part of Ubuntu exploring the x86-64-v3 micro-architecture feature level they produced an Ubuntu 23.04 based ISO built with x86-64-v3 packages and also setup a static archive of the packages as well so using APT on the experimental build will also fetch the optimized binaries. I decided to run some quick benchmarks of this Ubuntu 23.04 x86-64-v3 build compared to the default Ubuntu 23.04 x86 build.

Testing was done on a modern Intel Xeon Platinum 8592+ dual socket Emerald Rapids server with 1TB of RAM and a 960GB SSDSC2KG96 on the Intel Eagle Stream reference server. While no official announcement has been made by Canonical with their plans, it is my hope at least that they will decide to offer an Ubuntu Server ISO in x86-64-v3 flavor moving forward... There at least they can hopefully make it easier to target the right folks (knowledgeable server administrators) and less end-user confusion not sure of x86-64 micro-architecture feature levels or CPU brand/model information, etc. Plus if Canonical hopes to better cater Ubuntu Linux to HPC customers, etc, it would make a lot of sense at least offering it there if not an Ubuntu Desktop x86-64-v3 too. Anyways, we'll see what happens.

In regards to concerns whether Canonical would abandon the x86_64 baseline ahead of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, that was already clarified in the Ubuntu Discourse thread that Canonical is not planning to change the AMD64 baseline for Ubuntu 24.04 itself. So those still using old Intel/AMD x86_64 hardware shouldn't be concerned about losing Ubuntu compatibility for this upcoming Long Term Support release.

For evaluating the Ubuntu x86-64-v3 performance, I carried out clean installs of Ubuntu 23.04 and the Ubuntu 23.04 x86-64-v3 build on the same Emerald Rapids server hardware. On the software side was the same Linux 6.2 kernel, GCC 12, and other components from the aging Ubuntu 23.04 state.