Linux 7.2 vs. Linux 7.3 Shows A Few Improvements With AMD Strix Halo

Last week I ran some benchmarks showing performance gains for AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" on Ubuntu 26.10. Then shortly after that testing on its daily state, which used the Linux 7.2 kernel, Canonical switched to Linux 7.3 as the Ubuntu 26.10 kernel. Here are some Linux 7.2 vs. Linux 7.3 benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" with the Framework Desktop. The prior benchmarks were of Ubuntu 26.10 on Linux 7.2 and already in good shape with nice uplift over Ubuntu 26.04 LTS with its Linux 7.0 kernel. Now with Ubuntu 26.10 having transitioned to Linux 7.3 for the kernel it will ship with in October, I ran some Linux 7.2 vs. 7.3 benchmarks on Strix Halo to look for any other changes. The same AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 Framework Desktop was used for these kernel comparison benchmarks. The graphics benchmarks were largely the same with Linux 7.3 over Linux 7.2 for the Radeon 8060S Graphics, but in a few cases like the DDNet platformer game were some small improvements. The network latency tests were coming in slightly lower on Linux 7.3, similar to other system benchmarks of this in-development kernel version. The NUMA performance measured by Stress-NG was much improved with Linux 7.3. This aligns with big NUMA benchmark improvements observed in the recent AMD EPYC Server Performance Up ~8% Geo Mean For 2026 With Linux Kernel Improvements article. And some improvements in other select kernel micro-benchmarks with Linux 7.3 on Strix Halo. Across dozens of other real-world workloads ultimately tested though, Linux 7.3 wasn't yielding much of a difference on this AMD Ryzen AI Max+ desktop compared to Linux 7.2. But Linux 7.2 already was showing off quite well on Ubuntu 26.10 relative to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS on Linux 7.0. Even without any dramatic performance wins for this particular Framework Desktop with its already mature Linux support and for the workloads tested, Linux 7.3 comes with many other exciting features.