Ubuntu 23.10 Showing Nice Performance Improvements On Ampere Altra Max

In a number of HPC benchmarks, moving from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to Ubuntu 23.10 was showing some nice modest performance improvements. The upgrade means jumping from Linux 5.15 (unless using an HWE kernel) to Linux 6.5 and from GCC 11.4 to GCC 13.2, among many other package updates that rolled out over the past year and a half.

While Ubuntu 23.10 itself won't see much exposure in enterprise data centers, these numbers are positive considering Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is coming up in just about four months.

These performance improvements are exciting as they are delivering greater performance without any real change in CPU power consumption, so it's a win for power efficiency. Also notable is that on Ubuntu 23.10 the minimum CPU power consumption during the brief moments of idle were lower than on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

Ampere Altra is a mature platform with the series first premiering in 2020, but it's nice to see the performance continuing to improve.

Only in a few benchmarks was Ubuntu 23.10 or the Linux 6.7 run slower than Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.