Accelerate StarCoder with 🤗 Optimum Intel on Xeon: 4-bit Quantization & Assisted Generation

AI Impact Summary

This document details a significant acceleration strategy for StarCoder using 🤗 Optimum Intel on Xeon processors, leveraging techniques like 8-bit and 4-bit quantization with speculative decoding. The core innovation involves integrating Intel's Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) for BF16 acceleration and applying SmoothQuant for INT8 quantization, ultimately achieving a 3.35x speedup in TPOT with a 4-bit model. The key insight is that while BF16 offers initial acceleration, the memory bandwidth bottleneck shifts to INT8 and INT4 during autoregressive token generation, necessitating techniques like assisted generation to optimize performance.