1. Purpose of the gate
The production compiler, runtime and drivers are released from the qualified release candidate, built from tagged sources and signed, so the integrated software release can be published with the product.
Production software released is the software stack's own release decision. Customer workload qualification has shown that the release candidate runs lead customers' workloads correctly; this gate confirms that the compiler, runtime and drivers that will ship are that candidate, or differ from it only by reviewed and re-tested changes, and that they are built, signed and packaged the way customers will receive them.
For an accelerator the software is a large part of the product. Customers judge it by whether their models compile, run correctly at the agreed accuracy and reach the published performance, and by whether the stack installs cleanly on the supported operating systems and framework versions. A chip that has passed qualification is not ready for volume if the compiler or the drivers that run it are not.
The gate is held separately from the production release so that the software evidence gets its own review by the people who understand it, rather than a single line in the launch review. The production release then takes this decision record as an input, beside qualification passed, and the libraries team publishes the integrated software release and its documentation from the released components.
The release must be reproducible. Every component is built from tagged sources in a controlled environment, firmware and drivers are signed with production keys, and the build can be repeated later for a maintenance release or a field issue. A release that only one engineer's machine can build is not a production release.
Reviewers should leave able to say which versions are released, which configurations they support, which known issues ship with them, and how customers report problems and receive fixes.
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