2025.2.0
Summary of major features and improvements
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More GenAI coverage and framework integrations to minimize code changes
- New models supported on CPUs & GPUs: Phi-4, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, SD-XL Inpainting 0.1, Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large Turbo, Phi-4-reasoning, Qwen3, and Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct. Mistral 7B Instruct v0.3 is also supported on NPUs.
- Preview: OpenVINO ™ GenAI introduces a text-to-speech pipeline for the SpeechT5 TTS model, while the new RAG backend offers developers a simplified API that delivers reduced memory usage and improved performance.
- Preview: OpenVINO™ GenAI offers a GGUF Reader for seamless integration of llama.cpp based LLMs, with Python and C++ pipelines that load GGUF models, build OpenVINO graphs, and run GPU inference on-the-fly. Validated for popular models: DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen (1.5B, 7B), Qwen2.5 Instruct (1.5B, 3B, 7B) & llama-3.2 Instruct (1B, 3B, 8B).
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Broader LLM model support and more model compression techniques
- Further optimization of LoRA adapters in OpenVINO GenAI for improved LLM, VLM, and text-to-image model performance on built-in GPUs. Developers can use LoRA adapters to quickly customize models for specialized tasks.
- KV cache compression for CPUs is enabled by default for INT8, providing a reduced memory footprint while maintaining accuracy compared to FP16. Additionally, it delivers substantial memory savings for LLMs with INT4 support compared to INT8.
- Optimizations for Intel® Core™ Ultra Processor Series 2 built-in GPUs and Intel® Arc™ B Series Graphics with the Intel® XMX systolic platform to enhance the performance of VLM models and hybrid quantized image generation models, as well as improve first-token latency for LLMs through dynamic quantization.
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More portability and performance to run AI at the edge, in the cloud, or locally.
- Enhanced Linux* support with the latest GPU driver for built-in GPUs on Intel® Core™ Ultra Processor Series 2 (formerly codenamed Arrow Lake H).
- OpenVINO™ Model Server now offers a streamlined C++ version for Windows and enables improved performance for long-context models through prefix caching, and a smaller Windows package that eliminates the Python dependency. Support for Hugging Face models is now included.
- Support for INT4 data-free weights compression for ONNX models implemented in the Neural Network Compression Framework (NNCF).
- NPU support for FP16-NF4 precision on Intel® Core™ 200V Series processors for models with up to 8B parameters is enabled through symmetrical and channel-wise quantization, improving accuracy while maintaining performance efficiency.
Support Change and Deprecation Notices
- Discontinued in 2025:
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Runtime components:
- The OpenVINO property of Affinity API is no longer available. It has been replaced with CPU binding configurations (ov::hint::enable_cpu_pinning).
- The openvino-nightly PyPI module has been discontinued. End-users should proceed with the Simple PyPI nightly repo instead. More information in Release Policy.The openvino-nightly PyPI module has been discontinued. End-users should proceed with the Simple PyPI nightly repo instead. More information in Release Policy.
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Tools:
- The OpenVINO™ Development Tools package (pip install openvino-dev) is no longer available for OpenVINO releases in 2025.
- Model Optimizer is no longer available. Consider using the new conversion methods instead. For more details, see the model conversion transition guide.
- Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions (Intel® SSE) are currently not enabled in the binary package by default. They are still supported in the source code form.
- Legacy prefixes: l_, w_, and m_ have been removed from OpenVINO archive names.
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OpenVINO GenAI:
- StreamerBase::put(int64_t token)
- The
Boolvalue for Callback streamer is no longer accepted. It must now return one of three values of StreamingStatus enum. - ChunkStreamerBase is deprecated. Use StreamerBase instead.
- NNCF
create_compressed_model()method is now deprecated.nncf.quantize()method is recommended for Quantization-Aware Training of PyTorch and TensorFlow models. - OpenVINO Model Server (OVMS) benchmark client in C++ using TensorFlow Serving API.
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- Deprecated and to be removed in the future:
- Python 3.9 is now deprecated and will be unavailable after OpenVINO version 2025.4.
openvino.Type.undefinedis now deprecated and will be removed with version 2026.0.openvino.Type.dynamicshould be used instead.- APT & YUM Repositories Restructure: Starting with release 2025.1, users can switch to the new repository structure for APT and YUM, which no longer uses year-based subdirectories (like “2025”). The old (legacy) structure will still be available until 2026, when the change will be finalized. Detailed instructions are available on the relevant documentation pages:
- OpenCV binaries will be removed from Docker images in 2026.
- Ubuntu 20.04 support will be deprecated in future OpenVINO releases due to the end of standard support.
- “auto shape” and “auto batch size” (reshaping a model in runtime) will be removed in the future. OpenVINO’s dynamic shape models are recommended instead.
- MacOS x86 is no longer recommended for use due to the discontinuation of validation. Full support will be removed later in 2025.
- The
openvinonamespace of the OpenVINO Python API has been redesigned, removing the nestedopenvino.runtimemodule. The old namespace is now considered deprecated and will be discontinued in 2026.0.
You can find OpenVINO™ toolkit 2025.2 release here:
- Download archives* with OpenVINO™
- Install it via Conda:
conda install -c conda-forge openvino=2025.2.0 - OpenVINO™ for Python:
pip install openvino==2025.2.0
Acknowledgements
Thanks for contributions from the OpenVINO developer community: @11happy @rahulchaphalkar @sanleo-wq @ashwins990 @NingLi670 @mohame54 @chiruu12 @SuperChamp234 @ChrisAB @kimgeonsu @code-dev05 @Mohamed-Ashraf273 @arunthakur009 @Captain-MUDIT @Simonwzm @Hmm-1224 @srinjoydutta03 @hridaya14 @victorgearhead @Huanli-Gong @Imokutmfon
Release documentation is available here: https://docs.openvino.ai/2025 Release Notes are available here: https://docs.openvino.ai/2025/about-openvino/release-notes-openvino.html