Ampere Altra Max Performance For Ubuntu Linux 22.04 vs. 23.10 vs. 24.04

Following recent benchmarks looking at how the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release is looking on Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids as well as the performance gains for AMD EPYC 9004 series on Ubuntu 24.04, I next turned to the Ampere Altra ARM64 server processor for seeing what the performance is looking like there with this Long Term Support Linux distribution release due out in just over one month.

Now that we're into the feature freeze for Ubuntu 24.04 and is using the Linux 6.8 kernel that will power this Long Term Support release, I've begun testing out Ubuntu 24.04 on more hardware. Given the nice improvements seen for Intel Xeon Scalable Emerald Rapids and AMD EPYC Genoa-X on Ubuntu 24.04, I was curious to see what the Ubuntu Linux upgrade meant in the AArch64 world.

This round of Ubuntu 24.04 testing was done with the 128-core Ampere Altra Max using the Giga Computing (Gigabyte) G242-P36 server platform that I've been using with great success for my Altra (Max) testing over the past several months. This article is looking at the performance of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS versus Ubuntu 23.10 (non-LTS) and then the current development state of Ubuntu 24.04 as of this week. With Ubuntu 24.04 it means Ampere Altra Max now running on Linux 6.8, the GCC 13.2 compiler, Python 3.12, and many other software upgrades.

But unlike Intel Emerald Rapids and AMD Genoa(X), Ampere Altra is already quite a mature platform with the Altra processors having shipped since 2020 and the Ampere Altra Max since 2021... Sadly AmpereOne remains elusive for testing. So going into this with the mature Ampere Altra platform was expecting less benefits to Ubuntu 24.04 and indeed was the case but still for some workloads the AArch64 performance continues improving with this upcoming Ubuntu Linux release.