Accelerating Qwen3-8B Agent on Intel® Core™ Ultra with Depth-Pruned Draft Models
Using OpenVINO.GenAI, the baseline 4-bit Qwen3-8B on Intel Lunar Lake iGPU is accelerated by ~1.3x with a Qwen3-0.6B draft, and further to ~1.4x after applying simple pruning to the draft model. The improvements enable fast local AI agents with Hugging Face smolagents, leveraging the model's native agentic capabilities for tool use and multi-step reasoning.
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