Optimum Intel 2.0: An OpenVINO-First Toolkit for Running Open Models on Intel

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The headline: one library, one path Quickstart Day-one support for the newest open models Smarter quantization and compression Inference and architecture upgrades Who this is for A note on migration Get started Today we're releasing Optimum Intel 2.0, the biggest update to the library since its inception. This is a focusing release: Optimum Intel is now an OpenVINO-first toolkit, with a streamlined install, day-one support for the latest open models, and meaningful upgrades to quantization and inference. If your goal is to take the newest models from the Hugging Face Hub and run them efficiently on Intel CPUs, Arc GPUs, and Core Ultra NPUs, this release is for you.

Here's everything that's new and what it means in practice.

The headline: one library, one path

Optimum Intel started life as an umbrella over several Intel optimization backends. Over time, the OpenVINO path became the one most people actually used for deployment — for exporting models, compressing them, and running them across Intel CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs. Version 2.0 leans into that reality.