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

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.

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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