Powerful Intel Arc Graphics and DirectML Collaboration

Intel Arc Graphics and Microsoft’s DirectML

The use of generative AI technology is revolutionizing their workflow and opening up new possibilities in a variety of industries, including coding, real-time graphics, and video production. Now Intel and Microsoft are showcasing their collaborative engineering efforts to facilitate cutting-edge generative AI workloads on Intel GPUs running Windows, in conjunction with the Microsoft Ignite developer conference.

Intel Arc GPUs: Designed for AI workloads of the future

With the release of its Intel Arc A-Series graphics cards last year, Intel made a foray into the discrete GPU market. The Intel Arc A770 GPU, the flagship model in this family, has 16GB of high-bandwidth GDDR6 memory in addition to Intel Xe Matrix Extensions, a potent AI acceleration technology (Intel XMX.) The customized XMX array provides exceptional performance for applications requiring generative AI, particularly for matrix multiplication.

Subsequently, Intel and Microsoft have collaborated to enhance DirectML compatibility with Intel Arc graphics solutions, ranging from the Intel Arc A770 GPU to the Intel Arc GPUs integrated into the next Core Ultra mobile CPUs (also known as Meteor Lake).

Olive tweaks and additional

Ensuring that the models fit and perform effectively within the limitations of consumer PC system settings is one of the challenges developers have when delivering AI capabilities to client systems. Microsoft published the open-source Olive model optimization tool last year to aid in addressing this difficulty. Olive has just been upgraded with enhancements centered around some of the most fascinating new artificial intelligence models, such as the Llama 2 big language model from Meta and the Stable Diffusion XL text-to-image generator from Stability AI.

We discovered that the Olive-optimized version of Stable Diffusion 1.5 works on the Intel Arc A770 GPU via the ONNX Runtime with the DirectML execution provider at a performance that is twice as fast as the default model, demonstrating the potential of this tool.

Although there is a significant improvement, our work didn’t end there. For all generative AI tasks, a wide range of operators are optimized by Intel’s graphics driver. Our driver has a highly optimized version of the multi-head attention (MHA) metacommand, which significantly enhances efficiency by extracting even more from models such as Stable Diffusion. Consequently, our most recent driver outperforms the previous one by up to 36% in Stable Diffusion 1.5 on the Intel Arc A770 GPU.

The net effect is a cumulative acceleration of the Intel Arc A770’s Stable Diffusion 1.5 by up to 2.7 times.

Additionally, the Olive-optimized versions of Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL are now functionally supported by this new driver, and further optimizations for all three of these models are on the horizon.

Next, what?

Since many years ago, Intel has collaborated with developers to offer enhanced AI capabilities on our platforms. The work encompasses a variety of end-user apps, such as powerful suites for content production including Adobe Creative Cloud, the AI-enhanced portfolio from Topaz Labs, and Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve. With the use of our Intel Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) AI-based upscaling technology, we have also assisted game creators in providing improved gaming experiences in a number of well-known games. We’re going to keep driving the AI PC revolution on Windows 11 and beyond, together with Microsoft and the developer community!