Nice Performance Gains With SVT-AV1 2.3 Encoding On The System76 Thelio Astra

Written by Michael Larabel in Arm on 3 November 2024 at 06:26 AM EST. 3 Comments
ARM
With this week's release of SVT-AV1 2.3 for open-source AV1 encoding citing significant performance improvements for running on ARM, I was eager to see how well this AV1 encoder would be performing on the new System76 Thelio Astra ARM developer desktop powered by Ampere Altra. Here are some benchmarks showing those big speed-ups for ARM-based AV1 encoding.

For those that missed the recent article, the System76 Thelio Astra has been announced as an ARM64 developer desktop and System76's first ARM-based desktop design. The Thelio Astra is designed for autonomous driving development, AI, and other areas... Or practically for any other area where you may want a high core count ARM system under your desk and not looking for a noisy rackmount ARM server.

System76 Thelio Astra


Using the System76 Thelio Astra review unit with the 128-core Ampere Altra Max and running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, I ran some benchmarks of SVT-AV1 v2.2 vs. v2.3 on this ARM developer desktop. No other changes were made to the test or system besides swapping out the SVT-AV1 version in use.
SVT-AV1 System76 Thelio Astra

And sure enough the performance boost on AArch64 with the new SVT-AV1 2.3 was very apparent:
SVT-AV1 benchmark with settings of Version Comparison (Encoder Mode: Preset 3, Input: Bosphorus 4K). 2.3 was the fastest.

SVT-AV1 benchmark with settings of Version Comparison (Encoder Mode: Preset 5, Input: Bosphorus 4K). 2.3 was the fastest.

SVT-AV1 benchmark with settings of Version Comparison (Encoder Mode: Preset 8, Input: Bosphorus 4K). 2.3 was the fastest.

SVT-AV1 benchmark with settings of Version Comparison (Encoder Mode: Preset 3, Input: Bosphorus 1080p). 2.3 was the fastest.

SVT-AV1 benchmark with settings of Version Comparison (Encoder Mode: Preset 5, Input: Bosphorus 1080p). 2.3 was the fastest.

SVT-AV1 benchmark with settings of Version Comparison (Encoder Mode: Preset 8, Input: Bosphorus 1080p). 2.3 was the fastest.

SVT-AV1 benchmark with settings of Version Comparison (Encoder Mode: Preset 13, Input: Bosphorus 1080p). 2.3 was the fastest.

SVT-AV1 benchmark with settings of Version Comparison (Encoder Mode: Preset 8, Input: Beauty 4K 10-bit). 2.3 was the fastest.

Those wanting to carry out CPU-based AV1 encoding on ARM hardware will definitely want to upgrade to the new SVT-AV1 2.3. Though in the grand scheme of things the SVT-AV1 performance on ARM is still behind Intel/AMD x86_64. Those curious about some SVT-AV1 2.3 results across different CPUs can find some aggregate data via the test profile page. Those wanting to learn more about the Thelio Astra ARM64 developer machine itself can do so at System76.com.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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