Engineering the new Thelio Astra at System76

We sat down with System76 Mechanical Engineer, Britain and Product Manager, Tony to discuss some of the work that went into the development of Thelio Astra.

Thelio Astra overall performance

Tony: We've been doing benchmarking with the Ampere scripts. We've been able to do a lot of Phoronix testing, and it's performing really well over some of the more server grade cpus. I think it's topped out. We've seen at 200, 240 watts, which is a lot lower than we see some of the other higher end cpus. We're still doing a lot of benchmark testing. We're working with Ampere. They're sending new scripts over. We're still testing actual computer output through a power perspective. So far, it's been performing really well for how much power it uses.

Benchmarking Results

Tony: We did a bunch of benchmarking through a Phoronix test suite, and there was a test in specific called Sysbench that was just a multi-threaded general computational test. And compared to the other cpus that Phoronix tested it against, it actually performed in the 96 percentile. So that was actually really surprising how well it performed. There was also a test for computational fluid dynamics where it performed in the 99th percentile.
There's some tests that even ray tracing it was in the 94th percentile, so it's performing really well. We're still benchmarking and still testing the heck out of it. We'll have a lot more data as we get through these tests and things like that.

We're getting ready to set up a system now with emulation and running some of their tests and really seeing how well it performs versus an X86 system emulating arm software. Since this is a new platform for me, I'm very interested to see how well it performs.

Challenges that go into benchmarking for arm?

Tony: Through my experience, it's been a software thing. Arm is a new platform for me to work on. So getting the software up and in a good place where we can actually benchmark it efficiently has been a learning process. But with engineers at Ampere, they've been doing a lot of the heavy lifting as far as getting benchmark software ready. So that's probably been the main challenge there.

Thelio Astra Cooling Modifications

Britain: On the thermal side of things, during our initial testing, the CPU temp was a little bit higher than we wanted, so we got to do a few different modifications for the cooling. So we made our cpu duct a little bit larger, so it had a larger intake, so that more airflow would get to the cooler, and allow it to cool the cpu more efficiently. And we also made some modifications to the rear exhaust fan, and the modifications allowed it to prevent recirculation of hot air and make sure all the air exits the rear of the chassis. But after those changes, we were able to get the CPU down to a more reasonable temp during the stress tests.

We chose a larger cooler than typical. So that itself required some modifications for just the cpu ducting. And that allowed the cooling of the system to be a lot more efficient and stay at a lower operating temperature. That’s the main part to really accommodate the cpu. And everything else is really accommodating for the larger cooler. And with the larger cooler, there's more heat transfer, and therefore we need a little bit better airflow along with that. So that required a more efficient ducting system for the rear fan to prevent any kind of air recirculation. So they all kind of work hand in hand.

Configuration Options

Tony: We've definitely been testing with all the dims populated as that helps with the performance since it's an eight channel. As far as drives, nothing too specific there. Our test system that we've been running in the factory has been using 64 gig modules, which has given us plenty of memory to run tests. We actually just started running a test running a bunch of vms, and we just got the results in on that. And some of these things are software specific as far as the versions and images we're using for Ubuntu, and those are things that are still currently being tested. So far, the performance is looking really good. And as we go further along and do more of these benchmarks and more of these specific tests, I expect the performance to be even better.

The future of Thelio Astra

Tony: One of the things we do really well is we have really powerful workstations, and we put a lot of work into optimizing them. So having a workstation, a new workstation like arm to add to the collection of what we already offer is pretty exciting. It'll be interesting also to just go through as we iterate and then as we improve on the system going forward and watching the kind of things that Britain comes up with to make improvements. We've already been looking into memory cooling, so we've been experimenting with different things like that there. Constant improvements and iterations is what I'm excited about.

Get Ready to Power Up

Thelio Astra, ready for pre-order tomorrow, November 12, ships in December! Don't miss out on this cutting-edge ARM-powered system, designed to handle your toughest computing needs with ease and efficiency. Be one of the first to experience its high-performance capabilities by reserving yours today!