Voyager SDK v1.5 just dropped and this one's a bit special, for several reasons!
Since the Axelera community launched, we’ve seen posts asking about Ubuntu 24.04 support. Well, you can finally ditch those Docker workarounds as we've now got native support for Ubuntu 24.04!
And it comes with Python 3.12, which brings some nice quality-of-life improvements. Better error messages that tell you what went wrong, improved performance (particularly for CPU-bound operations like your pre/post-processing pipelines), and some sweet type hints that make debugging your inference pipelines less of a headache.
Some other highlights to catch your eye:
The big hardware news: Support for the new 4-chip PCIe Metis cards in both 16GB and 64GB variants. That's some serious firepower for anyone running multiple streams or larger models at the edge.
Cool new CV models:
- Oriented bounding box detection (Yolov8n-obb, Yolov8l-obb, Yolo11n-obb, Yolo11l-obb), which is brilliant for aerial imagery, document scanning, or any scenario where your objects aren't nicely axis-aligned
- Instance segmentation with Yolov8m-seg for pixel-perfect boundaries
- Pose estimation with Yolov8m-pose for keypoint detection
- Plus a bunch of new classification models including DenseNet-121 and the RegNet family
NOTE: There's a breaking change with the model format. Models compiled with older SDK versions need recompiling, and pre-compiled models need re-downloading. Bit of a pain, I know, but it's to support new LLM formats and future AIPU versions. But keep this in mind when you update.
LLM updates: Language models now run on Windows platforms, and the model format's been updated to support new LLM model formats and future AIPU versions. The recompilation point above means there’s a little work here if you’ve been testing LLMs already, but it's laying the groundwork for better LLM support going forward.
Core choice at runtime: The default compiler setting's changed too. It now uses resources_used=0.25 by default, which gives you flexibility to decide at runtime whether to use 1-4 cores without recompiling. Handy for testing different configurations without the compilation wait.
Check out the release notes right here.
What are you most excited about? The Ubuntu 24.04 support? The multi-chip cards? Or are you already eyeing up those oriented bounding box models for something specific?
