Canonical today announced an exciting step forward for Ubuntu Linux: the notion of architecture variants and now initially providing an Ubuntu 25.10 archive with x86_64-v3 built packages for enjoying better performance on modern Intel and AMD hardware.

With changes to dpkg, Apt, and Launchpad, Ubuntu Linux now has support to build multiple versions of a package. At the moment, around 2000 source packages of Ubuntu main have been rebuilt for x86_64-v3. The hope is for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS to have all packages built for an x86_64-v3 variant.

The x86_64-v3 micro-archtecture feature level allows making the assumption over AVX and AVX2 processor support. Plus other ISA features like BMI1/BMI2, FMA, MOVBE, and others. The x86_64-v3 feature level is roughly supported by Intel Haswell CPUs and newer or AMD Excavator processors and later. It's x86_64-v4 where things really get exciting with AVX-512. Ubuntu is referring to their x86_64-v3 variant as amd64v3.

[1]

More details on this Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 architecture variant via the [2]Ubuntu Discourse along with details on how to upgrade your Ubuntu 25.10 system to the amd64v3 packages. I will be running some comparison Ubuntu 25.10 benchmarks soon for showing how the performance can be impacted from these better optimized packages.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2025&image=ubuntu_2510_amd64v3_lrg

[2] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/introducing-architecture-variants-amd64v3-now-available-in-ubuntu-25-10/71312