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Question

Multi-Card Model Sharding / Unified Workloads — Roadmap or Workaround?

  • June 29, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 14 views

Hey everyone,

I am evaluating the Metis lineup for an edge AI project and have a specific question about multi-card architecture that I haven't found a definitive answer to in the docs or SDK references.

What I understand is supported today:

  • The Voyager SDK detects multiple Metis cards in a single host.

  • Each card runs its own independent inference pipeline.

  • A real-world surveillance example shows three 4-chip PCIe cards running five primary models + one secondary model in parallel across 48 AIPU cores.

My question: Is there any current or planned SDK support for splitting a single neural network across multiple Metis cards (e.g., layer sharding or tensor parallelism across two M.2 cards)? Or is the architecture strictly "one model must fit entirely within a single card's memory and AIPU"?

Context for my use case: I am looking at a host with dual M.2 slots (e.g., Radxa Orion O6N) and weighing whether two standard Metis M.2 cards could act as a unified 2-GB / 428-TOPS accelerator for a single large model, or if I should instead plan for a single M.2 Max (16 GB) and treat the dual-M.2 path as strictly for agent-swarming / multi-model parallelism.

If unified multi-card execution is not on the roadmap, a clear confirmation would help me (and likely others) size the right SKU upfront rather than over-provisioning hardware.

Thanks for any insight you can share.

1 reply

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Axelera Team
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  • Axelera Team
  • July 1, 2026

Hi ​@Meraclus! Ah, great question, and your framing is spot on.

Short answer: Voyager's multi-device support today is “scale-out” rather than “scale-up.” So each Metis card runs its own complete pipeline, and a model needs to fit into the card's memory and AIPU cores. There's nothing that fuses two cards into one logical accelerator (for want of a better phrase!) so two standard M.2 cards won't act as a unified 2 GB device for one model.

What multi card does give you is a single Context enumerates all cards and distributes independent workloads. The same model round-robined for throughput, or different models per card. Scaling is near-linear for compute-bound work, so that's exactly your agent-swarming/multi-model parallelism case, and a great fit for the dual-M.2 Orion O6N.

The general wisdom is to size around your largest single model's footprint first, then add cards for parallelism. 👍

Is there something specific you’re building that needs this kind of functionality?