Ubuntu 23.10 Showing Nice Performance Improvements On Ampere Altra Max

Gigabyte (Giga Computing) recently sent over their G242-P36 HPC/AI Arm server platform built for Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max processors. This 2U server platform can accommodate up to four graphics cards or a mix of GPUs and DPUs if so desired, for maxing out the AI possibilities on Arm. I'll have up a full review on the G242-P36 soon while in this article is a look at the direction of the Ubuntu Server Arm performance from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to now with Ubuntu 23.10 ahead of the important Ubuntu 24.04 LTS cycle.

Receiving the Giga Computing G242-P36 is great for delivering fresh Ampere Altra (Max) testing at Phoronix. With my Mt Jade reference server having been acting up, I haven't been able to deliver any Ampere Altra benchmarks in a number of months and so have been eager to put the G242-P36 through its paces with the 128-core Ampere Altra Max. One of the first items I was curious about visiting in my fresh benchmarks was seeing how Ubuntu 23.10 on Arm is performing given that Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is approaching in April as the next major long-term support release.

For seeing the direction of Ubuntu Linux Arm performance as we approach the next Long-Term Support release, from the G242-P36 + Ampere Altra Max 128-core setup I tested Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS and then repeated the tests on a clean install of Ubuntu 23.10. A secondary run of Ubuntu 23.10 was also done when upgrading from the default Linux 6.5 kernel to move to Linux 6.7 Git in being closer to the configuration that Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will ultimately ship. Ubuntu 23.10 is also on the GCC 13 compiler which is the version that will also be in use by Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

From there I ran dozens of benchmarks for looking at the direction of the Ampere Altra Max Ubuntu Linux server performance over the roughly past two years. The CPU power consumption was also monitored on a per-test basis in looking for any performance differences.