Yesterday Canonical announced architecture variants for Ubuntu Linux with Ubuntu 25.10 seeing the introduction of “amd64v3” packages that are built for the x86_64-v3 micro-architecture feature level to assume AVX/AVX2 and other newer CPU ISA features found since Intel Haswell and AMD Excavator processors. Eager to run some initial tests, here is a first look at the Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 performance for desktop workloads.

Ubuntu 25.10 now allows opt-in access to amd64v3 packages with many of the Ubuntu main archive packages rebuilt for the x86_64-v3 micro-architecture feature level. Come next April with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Canonical hopes to have all packages built for the x86_64-v3 variant.

Opting into the Ubuntu amd64v3 packages can be easily done via an Apt configuration file addition for setting “APT::Architecture-Variants “amd64v3”;“. Canonical hasn’t communicated any amd64v4 / x86_64-v4 architecture variant plans yet but that would be interesting for AVX-512 support in the Ubuntu packages.

For this preliminary Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 benchmarking, I compared the performance of a clean Ubuntu 25.10 install to that of then enabling the amd64v3 architecture variant and upgrading to all of those packages. For this round of testing I used the Framework Desktop with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 “Strix Halo” SoC with its integrated graphics. Similar Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 benchmarking with server workloads is currently being conducted with server hardware while this round of testing was mainly focused on desktop workloads.