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

GIMP obtained from the Ubuntu archive saw some slight benefits to its performance with the Ubuntu x86-64-v3 installation.

GNU Octave from the Ubuntu archive was slightly faster.

Select kernel operations as measured by Stress-NG were also faster on the experimental Ubuntu x86-64-v3 installation for this Intel Xeon Scalable server.

The Ubuntu x86-64-v3 performance benefits overall were typically small but consistent. In some workloads the x86-64-v3 applications obtained from the archive could be a great deal faster but ultimately it comes down to a subset of software that will really benefit.

It will be very interesting to see what Canonical decides with regards to an Ubuntu x86-64-v3 offering if they decide to make it an alternative architecture to their standard AMD64 (x86_64) builds or not pursue any additions for the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS cycle. With x86-64-v3 basically being Intel Haswell and AMD Excavator or newer (with some exceptions like select Atoms), it would be really interesting too if Canonical would consider an x86-64-v4 option for modern systems with AVX-512 support. While AVX-512 started off with a bad rap, the great support (and performance) across the entire AMD Zen 4 spectrum and newer Intel Xeon CPUs behaving much better with AVX-512 usage, it'd be really interesting to see at least an experimental Ubuntu x86-64-v4 build to see what that could mean for servers and HPC. In any case I'll keep monitoring to see what comes about with Ubuntu's performance optimizations in the new year.