With this week's release of [1]SVT-AV1 2.3 for open-source AV1 encoding citing significant performance improvements for running on ARM, I was eager to see how well this AV1 encoder would be performing on the new [2]System76 Thelio Astra ARM developer desktop powered by Ampere Altra. Here are some benchmarks showing those big speed-ups for ARM-based AV1 encoding.

For those that missed the recent article, the System76 Thelio Astra has been announced as an ARM64 developer desktop and System76's first ARM-based desktop design. The Thelio Astra is designed for autonomous driving development, AI, and other areas... Or practically for any other area where you may want a high core count ARM system under your desk and not looking for a noisy rackmount ARM server.

Using the System76 Thelio Astra review unit with the 128-core Ampere Altra Max and running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, I ran some benchmarks of SVT-AV1 v2.2 vs. v2.3 on this ARM developer desktop. No other changes were made to the test or system besides swapping out the SVT-AV1 version in use.

And sure enough the performance boost on AArch64 with the new SVT-AV1 2.3 was very apparent:

Those wanting to carry out CPU-based AV1 encoding on ARM hardware will definitely want to upgrade to the new SVT-AV1 2.3. Though in the grand scheme of things the SVT-AV1 performance on ARM is still behind Intel/AMD x86_64. Those curious about some SVT-AV1 2.3 results across different CPUs can find some aggregate data via [3]the test profile page . Those wanting to learn more about the Thelio Astra ARM64 developer machine itself can do so at [4]System76.com .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/SVT-AV1-2.3

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/review/system76-thelio-astra

[3] https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/svt-av1#results

[4] https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra