huggingface/optimum-intel

🤗 Optimum Intel: Accelerate inference with Intel optimization tools

What it solves

It simplifies the process of accelerating AI models on Intel hardware. It acts as a bridge between popular AI libraries (like Transformers, Diffusers, and Sentence Transformers) and the OpenVINO toolkit, allowing users to optimize and run models more efficiently on Intel CPUs, GPUs, and specialized AI accelerators.

How it works

The project provides a set of tools to convert AI models into the OpenVINO Intermediate Representation (IR) format. It allows users to export models using a command-line tool (optimum-cli) or a web-based space. Once converted, the library provides specific classes (such as OVModelForCausalLM) to load these optimized models for high-performance inference.

Who it’s for

Developers and machine learning engineers who want to maximize the performance of their models when deploying on Intel-based systems.

Highlights

  • High-performance inference on Intel CPUs, GPUs, and DL accelerators.
  • Simple model export to OpenVINO IR format via CLI or Hub space.
  • Support for post-training static quantization (e.g., int8) to further reduce model size and increase speed.
  • Integration with the 🤗 Transformers, Diffusers, and timm libraries.