The latest drivers for Intel’s Arc Alchemist introduce a significant 2.7X performance enhancement in the AI photo engine Stable Diffusion. While part of this boost can be attributed to typical marketing strategies, a notable portion of the credit goes to Microsoft Olive for driving the majority of the improvement. This isn’t the first instance where Arc GPU performance in robust diffusion has doubled, courtesy of Microsoft’s machine learning optimization toolchain, a trend observed in previous GPU driver updates.
Microsoft Olive plays a pivotal role as it analyzes AI and machine learning models to identify ways to optimize hardware acceleration. While it’s feasible to achieve performance gains without Olive, the AI-centric toolchain simplifies and streamlines the process significantly. Given the plethora of AI technologies available in the market, leveraging tools like Olive proves to be advantageous in the optimization journey.
The key components powering Intel’s Arc Alchemist GPUs are the Xe Matrix Additions (xMX), essentially Intel’s equivalent of Nvidia’s upscale offerings. These components, particularly the XMX cores, play a crucial role in accelerating tasks like Stable Diffusion and other AI operations. Earlier iterations of drivers failed to fully leverage the potential of XMX cores, whereas integrating Olive independently led to a twofold performance boost compared to Intel’s existing software.
Further optimization of the Microsoft Olive model by Intel resulted in unlocking the remaining performance potential, culminating in an impressive 2.7X enhancement in Secure Diffusion.
This remarkable performance leap is not an isolated incident in the realm of AI applications. Nvidia, for instance, achieved a similar feat by optimizing its drivers for firm diffusion using a comparable toolchain, showcasing the significant impact of such optimization strategies.
In contrast, AMD’s GPUs lack dedicated AI hardware, yet the latest RDNA 3 graphics cards exhibit superior performance in Stable Diffusion compared to the newer AMD GTs. While AMD has not reportedly tapped into Microsoft Olive for driver enhancements, the company is exploring tailored approaches to handle AI tasks more effectively. Moving forward, AMD may consider exploring the potential benefits of integrating Olive into its RX 7000 line offerings to further enhance performance and efficiency.
