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PayPalCanonical announced they're working on architecture variants of Ubuntu, to hopefully result in better optimisation and performance on modern processors.
Posted today on the Ubuntu Discourse forum, developer Michael Hudson Doyle they note how Ubuntu has a focus on wide compatibility but there is a performance trade-off with it. So with Ubuntu 25.10, they've now added support for packages that "target specific silicon variants, meaning you can have your cake and eat it too". The first supported is amd64v3 (x86-64-v3) that should be supported on Intel Haswell / AMD Excavator and above.
For those wanting to squeeze every possible bit of performance out of their machines, this sounds like a nice upgrade for Canonical to be working on.
As Doyle said they've made changes to dpkg, apt and Launchpad to support building multiple version of packages for different levels of the x86-64 architecture. Some packages are now available on an opt-in basis for the x86-64-v3 architecture level.
The current aim is to have the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release have all packages rebuilt and ready for the x84-64-v3 / amd64v3 architecture.
You can test it out yourself right now on an Ubuntu install. See the forum post for details.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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For those wanting to squeeze every possible bit of performance out of their machines, this sounds like a nice upgrade for Canonical to be working on.
The best thing one can do for performance on ununtu is to get rid of snaps.
The snaps version of microsoft edit was reported (by omgubuntu) to take 5 seconds to start on modern system.
Let me repeat that: 5 seconds to start *edit* because of a flagship tech.
The_Real_Bitterman 2 hours ago
Even though Linus hates this "abomination" of these feature levels as they are not really a thing from a CPU architecture point of view. Some do exposure only some "v3" Features, some with hybrid cores do even have "v3" only on one set of cores while the efficiency cores for example don't.
Anyway: Hope in the future Ubuntu does automatically install thoe v3 optimized packages on eligible hardware as Tumbleweed does. (Yes that is the whole reason I wrote this comment to say TW already does it)
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