Canonical Continues Exploring Ubuntu x86-64-v3 Images - Now In Microsoft's Cloud

Ubuntu maker Canonical has spent the past several months exploring Ubuntu x86-64-v3 based images for leveraging the x86_64 micro-architecture feature level capabilities to target the level embracing AVX/AVX2, FMA, BMI2, and other instructions supported largely since Intel Haswell and AMD Excavator era processors. As shown in benchmarks Ubuntu x86-64-v3 builds can deliver better performance for the AMD/Intel systems of the past number of years. Canonical's latest foray in this area is offering up Microsoft Azure images that are tailored for x86-64-v3.

Canonical announced today the availability of Microsoft Azure VM images that are of Ubuntu 23.10 built for the x86-64-v3 micro-architecture feature level. These are not intended to be used in production at this point but just for performance evaluation purposes in seeing the benefits to the x86-64-v3 packages against the baseline x86-64 builds.

It makes a lot of sense though to offer cloud images for x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels since it can be easily gated to supported systems, although all of the major hyperscalers are on much newer platforms that can safely assume x86-64-v3 and in most cases even x86-64-v4 with AVX-512 for recent Intel VMs or the latest AMD EPYC 9004 series based virtual machines. For HPC clouds and the like I'd really like to see x86-64-v4 Linux distribution images available.

Canonical announced the x86-64-v3 Ubuntu images for the Microsoft Azure cloud today via the Ubuntu Blog. Over on the Ubuntu Discourse are instructions for those wanting to experiment with the Ubuntu x86-64-v3 images on Microsoft's cloud.

Here's to hoping more Ubuntu x86-64-v3 images moving forward... Canonical hasn't announced any baseline support changes or the like for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and given that we're into the feature freeze, it doesn't look like there will be any official x86-64-v3 flavor for this Long-Term Support release or the like, but hopefully they'll be offering some Ubuntu 24.04 x86-64-v3 builds at least for testing/evaluation purposes or as an unofficial architecture. In any event hopefully this Ubuntu Linux performance tuning and optimization effort continues.