System76 and Ampere look to drive innovation in automotive tech with new Arm-powered Linux desktop

Thelio Astra will aid development of autonomous vehicles

News By Wayne Williams published 22 October 2024

Linux computer manufacturer System76 has partnered with Ampere, the chipmaker founded by former Intel President Renée James, to launch the Thelio Astra - a developer desktop built for autonomous vehicles (AV), advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), and software-defined vehicles (SDVs).

This new workstation is built around Arm64 architecture, using Ampere Altra processors, to provide developers with native Arm-based testing, reducing the need for inefficient Arm emulation on x86 systems.

Thelio Astra offers the automotive industry a way to achieve faster, more efficient development on architecture identical to that found in automotive electronic control units (ECUs).

Intensive automotive software development tasks

System76’s Thelio Astra aims to simplify development and testing for automotive projects, offering a versatile and efficient tool for developers working on the future of transportation.

According to System76’s Product Manager, Tony Rosella, “System76 is revolutionizing modern computing first with their Thelio Mega AI/ML power desktop, and now with Thelio Astra, an Arm developer desktop engineered to meet the demands of autonomous vehicle development.” He added, “We’ve created this optimized workstation built around the powerful Ampere processors, and designed for the unique challenges of automotive developers.”

The desktop system is designed to handle intensive automotive software development tasks with a range of high-end specifications. It supports up to 128 cores on the Ampere Altra processor, 512GB of DDR4 ECC memory, an Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada GPU, and up to 8TB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage. The desktop also includes dual 25 Gigabit Ethernet ports, ensuring fast data transfer and connectivity. System76 says this powerful setup will allow developers to execute demanding workloads like continuous software testing, simulation, and autonomous vehicle algorithms.

Joe Speed, Head of Edge at Ampere, emphasized the value of developing software natively on Arm64 architecture, saying, “End-to-end native parity is what the automotive industry needs to deliver better quality software faster. This 128-core desktop runs dozens of virtual ECUs executing thousands of unit tests.” He added, “System76 is democratizing AV and SDV development by putting this power into the developer’s hands, right on their desk.”

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