v1.0.3 — Lykuro Native Inference Engine (pre-release)

v1.0.3 (2026-08-15)

Metal kernel backend — faster than Ollama on Apple Silicon

New hand-written Metal compute-kernel backend (metal-fast FP16, metal-q8 INT8, metal-q4 INT4 weight-only; runtime-compiled MSL, no MPSGraph) replacing per-token graph execution with one fused command buffer per token. INT8/INT4 quantization follows the CUDA backend's scheme; activations stay FP16 with FP32 accumulation everywhere; all reductions are fixed-order, so output remains bit-exact run-to-run.

metal-q4 is now the default backend on macOS for run and the HTTP API. metal (the FP32 MPSGraph parity anchor) and every other backend remain selectable via --backend / hardware.backend (engine.json accepts the new names).

Measured on an M4 Pro (median decode over 256-token generations, identical client-side methodology for both engines) vs Ollama 0.32.5 q4_K_M:

Model	This engine (metal-q4)	Ollama q4_K_M
Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct	278 tok/s, TTFT 42 ms	246 tok/s, 103 ms
Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct	163 tok/s, TTFT 90 ms	154 tok/s, 101 ms

Quality gates: the FP16 kernel path tracks the CPU reference within tolerance on a teacher-forced trajectory (greedy-identical output on the real checkpoint); quantized modes are gated by quantization-tolerance parity tests; all modes are deterministic across runs (tests/metal/metal_fast_parity_test.cpp).

See docs/RELEASE_NOTES.md for full notes. Same pre-release caveats as v1.0.0 (unsigned macOS binaries pending Developer ID enrollment).

Downloads (SHA-256)

File	Platform / backend	SHA-256
lykuro-native-engine-macos-arm64	macOS Apple Silicon, Metal (single binary, ad-hoc signed)	ca3de24c0859839d84f08d520b322664e2589722eee0de57cb5d017367040015
lykuro-native-engine-macos-metal-1.0.3.tar.gz	macOS Apple Silicon, Metal (full package)	23a1c37cc17b0f60549dc1ba4fa371b3c258c289f8ea9664b687259ee97ffdb8
lykuro-native-engine-linux-cuda-1.0.3.tar.gz	Linux x86_64 + NVIDIA CUDA (full package)	072729741d3bc81b86849f640359097d19a2ce07204030f90d9fd7a758fc602e
lykuro-native-engine-linux-amd64	Linux x86_64, CPU (single binary)	271313b66b56e903fc10ff2549498f0d8150cea29e1aa15a1698186bcd0d6ab3
lykuro-native-engine-linux-arm64	Linux aarch64, CPU (single binary)	df168bcf73f02c47cbe58adf3cfae319de586699a331117106c3f1da68903a1e

Runtime requirements: Linux binaries need glibc + system OpenSSL (CUDA package additionally needs the NVIDIA driver/CUDA runtime); macOS binaries need Apple Silicon (arm64) and are ad-hoc signed — browser downloads need xattr -d com.apple.quarantine once.