Announcements

• This release introduces Execution Provider (EP) Plugin API, which is a new infrastructure for building plugin-based EPs. (#24887 , #25137, #25124, #25147, #25127, #25159, #25191, #2524)

• This release introduces the ability to dynamically download and install execution providers. This feature is exclusively available in the WinML build and requires Windows 11 version 25H2 or later. To leverage this new capability, C/C++/C# users should use the builds distributed through the Windows App SDK, and Python users should install the onnxruntime-winml package(will be published soon). We encourage users who can upgrade to the latest Windows 11 to utilize the WinML build to take advantage of this enhancement.

Upcoming Changes

• The next release will stop providing x86_64 binaries for macOS and iOS operating systems.
• The next release will increase the minimum supported macOS version from 13.4 to 14.0.
• The next release will stop providing python 3.10 wheels.

Execution & Core Optimizations

Shutdown logic on Windows is simplified

Now on Windows some global object will be not destroyed if we detect that the process is being shutting down(#24891) . It will not cause memory leak as when a process ends all the memory will be returned to the operating system. This change can reduce the chance of having crashes on process exit.

AutoEP/Device Management

Now ONNX Runtime has the ability to automatically discovery computing devices and select the best EPs to download and register. The EP downloading feature currently only works on Windows 11 version 25H2 or later.

Execution Provider (EP) Updates

ROCM EP was removed from the source tree. Users are recommended to use Migraphx or Vitis AI EPs from AMD. A new EP, Nvidia TensorRT RTX, was added.

Web

EMDSK is upgraded from 4.0.4 to 4.0.8

WebGPU EP

Added WGSL template support.

QNN EP

SDK Update: Added support for QNN SDK 2.37.

KleidiAI

Enhanced performance for SGEMM, IGEMM, and Dynamic Quantized MatMul operations, especially for Conv2D operators on hardware that supports SME2 (Scalable Matrix Extension v2).

Known Problems

• There was a change in build.py that was related to KleidiAI that may cause build failures when doing cross-compiling (#26175) .

Contributions

Contributors to ONNX Runtime include members across teams at Microsoft, along with our community members:

@1duo, @Akupadhye, @amarin16, @AndreyOrb, @ankan-ban, @ankitm3k, @anujj, @aparmp-quic, @arnej27959, @bachelor-dou, @benjamin-hodgson, @Bonoy0328, @chenweng-quic, @chuteng-quic, @clementperon, @co63oc, @daijh, @damdoo01-arm, @danyue333, @fanchenkong1, @gedoensmax, @genarks, @gnedanur, @Honry, @huaychou, @ianfhunter, @ishwar-raut1, @jing-bao, @joeyearsley, @johnpaultaken, @jordanozang, @JulienMaille, @keshavv27, @kevinch-nv, @khoover, @krahenbuhl, @kuanyul-quic, @mauriciocm9, @mc-nv, @minfhong-quic, @mingyueliuh, @MQ-mengqing, @NingW101, @notken12, @omarhass47, @peishenyan, @pkubaj, @qc-tbhardwa, @qti-jkilpatrick, @qti-yuduo, @quic-ankus, @quic-ashigarg, @quic-ashwshan, @quic-calvnguy, @quic-hungjuiw, @quic-tirupath, @qwu16, @ranjitshs, @saurabhkale17, @schuermans-slx, @sfatimar, @stefantalpalaru, @sunnyshu-intel, @TedThemistokleous, @thevishalagarwal, @toothache, @umangb-09, @vatlark, @VishalX, @wcy123, @xhcao, @xuke537, @zhaoxul-qti