Hardware-specific considerations
Different hardware platforms—such as GPUs, CPUs, or specialized accelerators such as TPUs—can have vastly different capabilities and performance characteristics when it comes to handling quantized models. For instance, some hardware may natively support INT8 operations, while others are optimized for FP16.
Understanding the target deployment hardware is crucial for selecting the right quantization technique. For example, NVIDIA GPUs are well-suited to FP16 computations due to their support for mixed-precision training and inference, while CPUs often perform better with INT8 quantization because of hardware-accelerated integer operations.
When deploying LLMs in production, it is important to experiment with quantization strategies tailored to your specific hardware and ensure that your model leverages the strengths of the platform.