Ubuntu prides itself on being among the most compatible Linux distributions. Compatibility is often a conscious trade-off against bleeding-edge performance. In Ubuntu 25.10, we have added support for packages that target specific silicon variants, meaning you can have your cake and eat it too! Back in 2023 I wrote an article talking about the history of the amd64/x86-64 architecture and described the “levels” x86-64-v2, -v3, and -v4 (often referred to as amd64v3, amd64v4, etc.). Since then, we’...
Old tests on old compilers run on old Intel CPUs may have regressions. I forget the details, but back when all this was new, some CPUs would downclock if they even *see *an AVX2/AVX512 instruction.
Modern CPUs (mostly) don’t do that.
It also shrinks the packages some (so less bandwidth and client disk usage, at the cost of compile time/disk space on the host’s side, which is a decent trade), and applications that show more improvement tend to be more intense anyway.