Ubuntu 25.04 Advancing The Performance Of The System76 Thelio Astra With Ampere Altra
When putting FFmpeg through a variety of video coding scenarios, there was terrific uplift moving from Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to Ubuntu 25.04. The upgrade goes from Linux 6.8 to Linux 6.14, GCC 13.3 to GCC 14.2, and a wealth of other updated packages. The Linux kernel has seen a number of optimizations over the past year for the ARM64 code thanks to Linus Torvalds himself now also using an Ampere Altra system for testing.
The updated Zstd of Ubuntu 25.04 also provides some performance advantages on the System76 Thelio Astra compared to the current Ubuntu LTS release.
Even with Ampere Altra being in the marketplace for 4+ years at this point, the new Ubuntu Linux release with the updated kernel, compiler, and other packages is continuing to open up additional performance headroom.
For those looking at the System76 Thelio Astra for any AI development work, PyTorch was enjoying better performance on Ubuntu 25.04 than Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for CPU-based AI tasks.