System76 Thelio Astra Reviewed: High-End ARM64 Developer Desktop

System76 kindly sent over a Thelio Astra review unit for testing at Phoronix in advance of today's launch and the release set for 12 November. The review unit was configured with the Ampere Altra Max M128-30 processor, 8 x 32GB DDR4-3200 memory, 1TB Kingston PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD, and NVIDIA RTX 400 Ada Generation graphics.

The Thelio Astra chassis was beautifully crafted and well designed, in-line with what we've seen in the past with System76 from their other Intel and AMD x86_64 systems.

The Thelio Astra is making use of an ASRock Rack motherboard for this Ampere Altra developer desktop. In particular, it's the ASRockRack ALTRAD8UD-1L2T micro-ATX server-grade motherboard being used by the System76 Thelio Astra.

While System76 maintains their own in-house Linux distribution with Pop!_OS that is derived from Ubuntu LTS releases, the Thelio Astra is shipping with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Pop!_OS has offered an ARM64 version for Raspberry Pi use but it makes sense in this context going for upstream Ubuntu rather than Pop!_OS. Given that the System76 Thelio Astra is catering to being a native ARM64 developer desktop focusing in on AI / ML / ADAS type workloads where the actual devices where software is being deployed to is likely on Ubuntu Linux or another (non-Pop!_OS) enterprise distribution.

The Thelio Astra has been working well on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS in my testing over the past week and a half thus far. Given the maturity of the Ampere Altra platform, most any modern Linux distribution and open-source software should work rather well.

For getting an idea as to the performance of the System76 Thelio Astra with Ampere Altra Max M128-30, I ran some benchmarks comparing it to the System76 Thelio Major with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X. That earlier System76 desktop Threadripper workstation launched at the beginning of the year and is tested with the 64-core / 128-thread Threadripper 7980X (Zen 4), 4 x 32GB DDR5-4800, 1TB NVMe SSD, and Ubuntu 24.04 lTS like with the Thelio Astra.

In addition to looking at the raw performance between these System76 x86_64 and ARM64 workstations, the CPU power consumption and thermals were also monitored.