Intel's latest Arc Alchemist drivers feature a performance boost of 2.7X in AI image generator Stable Diffusion. Although some of that boost was thanks to good old-fashioned optimization, which the Intel driver team is well known for, most of the uplift was thanks to Microsoft Olive. Microsoft's machine learning optimization toolchain doubled Arc GPU performance in Stable Diffusion on its own, and it's not even the first time we've seen it happen in GPU drivers.
Microsoft Olive is a piece of software that basically takes an AI or machine learning model and then finds all the ways different hardware can accelerate it. While this isn't impossible without Olive, the AI-focused toolchain makes it so much easier. There is a large amount of AI hardware on the market made by different companies, and being able to skip a big step in the optimization process is really handy.
