Pushing the Envelope of LLM Inference with Ultra-Low-Bit Quantized Models

The advent of ultra-low-bit LLM models, approaching the perplexity and task accuracy of their full precision counterparts, is ushering in a new era of LLM inference. While these advances promise models that are cost-effective regarding latency, memory, throughput, and energy consumption, the efficiency of runtimes for deploying ultra-low-bit models remains under-explored. In this work, we take a bottom-up approach: we first implement 2-bit microkernels for modern CPUs, achieving close-to-roofline performance. We integrate these microkernels into LLM inference pipelines and present end-to-end results with 2-bit models, outperforming the state-of-the-art (SOTA) bitnet.cpp runtime by 2.2×, and deliver up to 7× speedup compared to 16-bit inference. We extend this work to Intel Xe2 GPUs where we implement mixed-precision, 2-bit kernels, and show their performance to be close-to-optimal. We integrated the GPU kernels in the vLLM framework and evaluated end-to-end inference for a range of models and Xe2 GPUs. We obtain up to 6.7× speedup compared to the 16-bit pipeline, pushing the envelope of LLM inference.