Q2'25: Technology Update – Low Precision and Model Optimization

Scope of this document

This article explains the behavior of dynamic quantization on GPUs with XMX, such as Lunar Lake, Arrow lake and discrete GPU family(Alchemist, Battlemage).

It does not cover CPUs or GPUs without XMX(such as Meteor Lake). While the dynamic quantization is supported on these platforms as well, the behavior may differ slightly.

What is dynamic quantization?

Dynamic quantization is a technique to improve the performance of transformer networks by quantizing the inputs to matrix multiplications. It is effective when weights are already quantized into int4 or int8. By performing the multiplication in int8 instead of fp16, computations can be executed faster with minimal loss in accuracy.

To perform quantization, the data is grouped, and the minimum and maximum values within each group are used to calculate the scale(and zero-point) for quantization. In OpenVINO’s dynamic quantization, this grouping occurs along the embedding axis (i.e., the innermost axis). The group size is configurable, as it impacts both performance and accuracy.

Default behavior on GPU with XMX for OpenVINO 2025.2

In the OpenVINO 2025.2 release, dynamic quantization is enabled by default for GPUs with XMX support. When a model contains a suitable matrix multiplication layer, OpenVINO automatically inserts a dynamic quantization layer before the MatMul operation. No additional configuration is required to activate dynamic quantization.

By default, dynamic quantization is applied per-token, meaning a unique scale value is generated for each token. This per-token granularity is chosen to maximize performance benefits.

However, dynamic quantization is applied conditionally based on input characteristics. Specifically, it is not applied when the token length is short—64 tokens or fewer.(That is, the row size of the matrix multiplication)

For example:

    -If you run a large language model (LLM) with a short input prompt (≤ 64 tokens), dynamic quantization is disabled.

    -If the prompt exceeds 64 tokens, dynamic quantization is enabled and may improve performance.

Note: Even in the long-input case, the second token is currently not dynamically quantized because row-size in matrix multiplication is small with KV cache.

Performance and Accuracy Impact

The impact of dynamic quantization on performance and accuracy can vary depending on the target model.

Performance

In general, dynamic quantization is expected to improve the performance of transformer models, including large language models (LLMs) with long input sequences—often by several tens of percent. However, the actual gain depends on several factors:

    -Low  MatMul Contribution: If the MatMul operation constitutes only a small portion of the model's total execution time, the performance benefit will be limited. For instance, in very long-context inputs, scaled-dot-product-attention may dominate the runtime, reducing the relative  impact of MatMul optimization.

    -Short Token Lengths: Performance gains diminish with shorter token lengths. While dynamic quantization improves compute efficiency, shorter inputs tend to be dominated by weight I/O overhead rather than compute cost.

Accuracy

Accuracy was evaluated using an internal test set and found to be within acceptable limits. However, depending on the model and workload, users may observe noticeable accuracy degradation.

If accuracy is a concern, you may:

    -Disable dynamic quantization, or

    -Use a smaller group size (e.g., 256), which can improve accuracy at some cost to performance.

How to Verify If dynamic quantization is Enabled on GPU with XMX

Since dynamic quantization occurs automatically under the hood, you may want to verify whether it is active. There are two main methods to check:

    -Execution graph (exec-graph): The transformed graph generated by OpenVINO will include an additional "dynamic_quantize" layer if dynamic quantization is applied. You can inspect this by dumping the execution graph using the benchmark_app tool, assuming your model can be run with it. Please see the documentation for details:  https://docs.openvino.ai/nightly/get-started/learn-openvino/openvino-samples/benchmark-tool.html

    -Opencl-intercept-layer: You can view the list of executed kernels using the opencl-intercept-layer. Both call logging and device performance timing modes will show the "dynamic_quantize" kernel if it is executed.  https://github.com/intel/opencl-intercept-layer

GraphTransformation with Dynamic Quantization

When dynamic quantization is enabled (i.e., dynamic_quantization_group_size != 0), a dynamic_quantize node is inserted before the target matrix multiplication nodes. (See the diagram above) Since the input length for LLMs is only known at inference time, the execution path is determined dynamically. If the input length is short (≤ 64 tokens), the dynamic_quantize node is skipped. For longer inputs, the node is executed to apply quantization.

If dynamic quantization is disabled (dynamic_quantization_group_size == 0), the dynamic_quantize node is not added to the graph at all.

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Related properties

    -dynamic_quantization_group_size: Sets the group size for dynamic quantization. In OpenVINO 2025.2, for GPUs with XMX, the default value is UINT64_MAX, which corresponds to per-token quantization.
    For instructions on setting this property, please refer to:  https://docs.openvino.ai/2025/openvino-workflow-generative/inference-with-optimum-intel.html#enabling-openvino-runtime-optimization

    -OV_GPU_ASYM_DYNAMIC_QUANTIZATION: Enables asymmetric dynamic quantization. This means that in addition to the scale, a zero-point value is also computed during quantization. This setting is configured via an environment variable.

    -OV_GPU_DYNAMIC_QUANTIZATION_THRESHOLD: Defines the minimum token length (or row size of the matrix) required to apply dynamic quantization. If the input token length is less than or equal to this value, dynamic quantization is not applied.
    The default value is 64.
    This setting can also be configured via an environment variable.

Authors: Ivan Novoselov, Alexandra Sidorova, Vladislav Golubev, Dmitry Gorokhov

Introduction

Deep learning (DL) has become a powerful tool for addressing challenges in various domains like computer vision, generative AI, and natural language processing. Industrial applications of deep learning often require performing inference in resource-constrained environments or in real time. That’s why it’s essential to optimize inference of DL models for particular use cases, such as low-latency, high-throughput or low-memory environments. Thankfully, there are several frameworks designed to make this easier, and OpenVINO stands out as a powerful tool for achieving these goals.

OpenVINO is an open-source toolkit for optimization and deployment of DL models. It demonstrates top-tier performance across a variety of hardware including CPU (x64, ARM), AI accelerators (Intel NPU) and Intel GPUs. OpenVINO supports models from popular AI frameworks and delivers out-of-the box performance improvements for diverse applications (you are welcome to explore demo notebooks). With ongoing development and a rapidly growing community, OpenVINO continues to evolve as a versatile solution for high-performance AI deployments.

The primary objective of OpenVINO is to maximize performance for a given DL model. To do that, OpenVINO applies a set of hardware-dependent optimizations The optimizations are typically performed by replacing a target group of operations with a custom operation that can be executed more efficiently. In the standard approach, these custom operations are executed using handcrafted implementations. This approach is highly effective when optimizing a few patterns of operations. On the other hand, it lacks scalability and thus requires too much effort when dozens of similar patterns should be supported.

To address this limitation and build a more flexible optimization engine, OpenVINO introduced Snippets, an integrated Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler for computational graphs. Snippets provide a flexible and scalable approach for operation fusions and enablement. The graph compiler automatically identifies subgraphs of operations that can benefit from fusion and combines them into a single node, referred to as “Subgraph”. Snippets then apply a series of optimizing transformations to the subgraph and JIT compile an executable that efficiently performs the computations defined by the subgraph.

One of the most common examples of such subgraphs is Scaled Dot-Product Attention (SDPA) pattern. SDPA it is a cornerstone of transformer-based architectures which dominate most of the state-of-the-art models. There are numerous SDPA pattern flavours and variations dictated by model-specific adjustments or optimizations. Thanks to compiler-based design, Snippets support most of these configurations. Fig. 1 illustrates the general structure of the SDPA pattern supported by Snippets, highlighting its adaptability to different model requirements:

Note that SDPA has quadratic time and memory complexity with respect to sequence length. It means that by fusing SDPA-like patterns, Snippets significantly reduce memory consumption and accelerate transformer models, especially for large sequence lengths.

Snippets effectively optimized SDPA patterns but had a key limitation: they did not support dynamic shapes. In other words, input shapes must be known at the model compilation stage and can’t be changed in runtime. This limitation reduced the applicability of Snippets to many real-world scenarios where input shapes are not known in advance. While it is technically possible to JIT-compile a new binary for each unique set of input shapes, this approach introduces significant recompilation overheads, often negating the performance gains from SDPA fusion.

Fortunately, this static-shape limitation is not inherent to Snippets design. They can be modified to support dynamic shapes internally and generate shape-agnostic binaries. In this post, we discuss Snippets architecture and the challenges we faced during this dynamism enablement.

Architecture

The first step of the Snippets pipeline is called Tokenization. It is applied to an ov::Model, which represents OpenVINO Intermediate Representation (IR). It’s a standard IR in the OV Runtime you can read more about it here or here. The purpose of this stage is to identify parts of the initial model that can be lowered by Snippets efficiently. We are not going to discuss Tokenization in detail because this article is mostly focused on the dynamism implementation. A more in-depth description of the Tokenization process can be found in the Snippets design guide. The key takeaway for us here is that the subsequent lowering is performed on a part of the initial ov::Model. We will call this part Subgraph, and the Subgraph at first is also represented as an ov::Model.

Now let’s have a look at the lowering pipeline, its schematic representation is shown on Fig.2a. As can be seen from the picture, the lowering process consists of three main phases: Data Flow Optimizations, Control Flow Optimizations and Binary Code Generation. Let’s briefly discuss each of them.

Lowering Pipeline

The first stage is the Data Flow optimizations. As we mentioned above, this stage’s input is a part of the initial model represented as an ov::Model. This representation is very convenient for high-level transformations such as opset conversion, operations’ fusion/decomposition and precision propagation. Here are some examples of the transformations performed on this stage:

1. ConvertPowerToPowerStatic — operation Power with scalar exponent input is converted to PowerStatic operation from the Snippets opset. The PowerStatic ops then use the values of the exponents to produce more optimal code.
2. FuseTransposeBrgemm — Transpose operations that can be executed in-place with Brgemm blocks are fused into the Brgemm operations.
3. PrecisionPropagation pass automatically inserts Converts operations between the operations that don’t natively support the desired execution precision.

The next stage of the lowering process is Control Flow optimizations (or simply CFOs). Note that the ov::Model is designed to primarily describe data flow, so is not very convenient for CFOs. Therefore, we had to develop our own IR (called Linear IR or simply LIR) that explicitly represents both control and data flows, you can read more about LIR here. So the ov::Model IR is converted to LIR before the start of the CFOs.

As you can see from the Fig.2a, the Control Flow optimization pipeline could roughly be divided into three main blocks. The first one is called Loop Generation and Optimization. This block includes all loop-related optimizations such as automatic generation of loops based on the input tensors’ dimensions, loop fusion and blocking loops generation.

The second block of Control Flow optimizations is called Utility Ops Insertion. We need this block of transformations here to insert utility operations that depend on loop control structures, specifically on their entry and exit points locations. For example, operations like Load, Store, MemoryBuffer, LoopBegin and LoopEnd are inserted during this stage.

The last step of CFO is the Memory Usage Optimizations block. These transformations determine required sizes of internal memory buffers, and analyze how much of that memory can be reused. A graph coloring algorithm is employed to minimize memory consumption.

Now all Control Flow optimizations are performed, and we are ready to proceed to the next stage of the lowering pipeline — Binary Code Generation (BCG). As one can see from Fig.2a, this stage consists of three substages. The first one is Register Assignment. We use a fairly standard approach here: calculate live intervals first and use the linear scan algorithm to assign abstract registers that are later mapped to physical ones.

The next BSG substage is Loop Expansion. To better understand its purpose, let’s switch gears for a second and think about loops in general. Sometimes it’s necessary to process the first or the last iteration of a loop in a special way. For example, to initialize a variable or to process blocking loops’ tails. The Loop Expansion pass unrolls these special iterations (usually the first or the last one) and explicitly injects them into the IR. This is needed to facilitate subsequent code emission.

The final step of the BCG stage is Code Emission. At this stage, every operation in our IR is mapped to a binary code emitter, which is then used to produce a piece of executable code. As a result, we produce an executable that performs calculations described by the initial input ov::Model.

Dynamic Shapes Support

Note that some stages of the lowering pipeline are inherently shape-sensitive, i.e. they rely on specific values of input shapes to perform optimizations. These stages are schematically depicted on the Fig. 2b.

As can be seen from the picture, shapes are used to determine loops’ work amounts and pointer increments that should be performed on every iteration. These parameters are later baked into the executable during Code Emission. Another example is Memory Usage Optimizations, since input shapes are needed to calculate memory consumption. Loop Expansion also relies on input shapes, since it needs to understand if tail processing is required for a particular loop. Note also that Snippets use compute primitives from third-party libraries, BRGEMM block from OneDNN for example. These primitives should as well be compiled with appropriate parameters that are also shape-sensitive.

One way to address these challenges is to rerun the lowering pipeline for every new set of input shapes, and to employ caching to avoid processing the same shapes twice. However, preliminary analysis indicated that this approach is too slow. Since this re-lowering needs to be performed in runtime, the performance benefit provided by Snippets is essentially eliminated by the recompilation overheads.

The performed experiments thus indicate that we can afford to run the whole lowering pipeline only once during the model compilation stage. Only some minor adjustments can be made at runtime. In other words, we need to remove all shape-sensitive logic from the lowering pipeline and perform the compilation without it. The remaining shape-sensitive transformations should be performed at runtime. Of course, we would also need to share this runtime context with the compiled shape-agnostic kernel. The idea behind this approach is schematically represented on Fig. 2c.

As one can see from the picture, all the shape-sensitive transformations are now performed by a new entity called Runtime Configurator. It’s probably easier to understand its purpose in some examples.

Imagine that we need to perform a unary operation get_result(X) on an input tensor X — for example, apply an activation function. To do this, we need to load some input data from memory into registers, perform the necessary computations and write the results back to memory. Of course this read-compute-write sequence should be done in a loop since we need to process the entire input tensor. These steps are described in more detail in Fig. 3 using pseudocode. Fig. 3a corresponds to a static kernel while Fig. 3b represents a dynamic one.

Let’s consider the static kernel as a starting point. As the first step, we need to load pointers to input and output memory blobs to general-purpose registers (or simply GPRs) denoted G_IN and G_OUT on the picture. Then we initialize another GPR that stores the loop work amount (G_WA). Note that the loop is used to traverse the input tensor, so the loop’s work amount is fixed because the tensor’s dimensions are also known at the BCG stage. The next six steps in the picture (3 to 8) are in the loop’s body.

In step 3, we load input data into a vector register V_0, note that the appropriate pointer is already loaded to G_IN, and offset_in is fixed because the input tensor is static. Next, we apply our get_result function to the data in V_0 and place the result in a spare vector register V_1. Now we need to store V_1 back to memory, which is done on step 5. Note that offset_out is also known in the static case. This brings us almost to the end of the loop’s body, and the last few things we need to do are to increment data pointers (step 6), decrement loop counter (step 7), and jump to the beginning of the body, if needed (step 8).

Finally, we need to reset data pointers to their initial values after the loop is finished, which is done using finalization offsets on step 9. Note that this step could be omitted in our simplified example, but it’s often needed for more complicated use cases, such as when the data pointers are used by subsequent loops.

Now that we understand the static kernel, let’s consider the dynamic one, which is shown in Fig. 3b. Unsurprisingly, the dynamic kernel performs essentially the same steps as the static one, but with additional overhead due to loading shape-dependent parameters from the extended runtime arguments. Take step 1 as an example, we need to load not only memory pointers (to G_IN and G_OUT), but also a pointer to the runtime arguments prepared by the runtime configurator (to G_ARG).

Next, we need to load a pointer to the appropriate loop descriptor (a structure that stores loops’ parameters) to a temporary register G_TMP, and only then we can initialize the loop’s work amount register G_WA (step 2). Similarly, in order to load data to V_0, we need to load a runtime-calculated offset from the runtime arguments in step 3. The computations in step 4 are the same as in the static case, since they don’t depend on the input shapes. Storing the results to memory (step 5) requires reading a dynamic offset from the runtime arguments again. Next, we need to shift the data pointers, and again we have to load the increments from the corresponding loop descriptor in G_ARG because they are also shape-dependent, as the input tensor can be strided. The following two steps 7 and 8 are the same as in the static case, but the finalization offsets are also dynamic, so we have to load them from G_ARG yet again.

As one can see from Fig. 3, dynamic kernels incorporate additional overhead due to reading the extended runtime parameters provided by the runtime configurator. However, this overhead could be acceptable as long as the input tensor is large enough (Load/Store operations would take much longer than reading runtime arguments from L1) and the amount of computation is sufficient (get_results is much larger than the overhead). Let’s consider the performance of this design in the Results section to see if these conditions are met in practical use cases.

Results

We selected three platforms to evaluate the dynamic pipeline’s performance in Snippets. These platforms represent different market segments: the Intel Core machine is designed for high-performance user and professional tasks. While the Intel Xeon is a good example of enterprise-level hardware often used in data centers and cloud computing applications. The information about the platforms is described in the table below:

As discussed in the Introduction, Snippets support various SDPA-like patterns which form the backbone of Transformer models. These models often work with input data of arbitrary size (for example, sequence length in NLP). Thus, dynamic shapes support in Snippets can efficiently accelerate many models based on Transformer architecture with dynamic inputs.

We selected 43 different Transformer-models from HuggingFace to measure how the enablement of dynamic pipeline in Snippets affects performance. The models were downloaded and converted to OpenVINO IRs using Optimum Intel. These models represent different domains and were designed to solve various tasks in natural language processing, text-to-image image generation and speech recognition (see full model list at the end of the article). What unifies all these models is that they all contain SDPA subgraph and thus can be accelerated by Snippets.

Let’s take a closer look at the selected models. The 37 models of them solve different tasks in natural language processing. Their performance was evaluated using a list of 2000 text sequences with different lengths, which also mimics the real-word scenario. The total processing time of all the sequences were measured in every experiment. Note that the text sequences were converted to model inputs using model-specific tokenizers prior to the benchmarking. The lengths’ distribution of the tokenized sequences is shown on Fig. 4. As can be seen from the picture, the distribution is close to normal with the mean length of 31 tokens.

The other 6 models of the selected model scope solve tasks in text-to-image image generation (Stable Diffusion) and speech recognition (Whisper). These models decompose into several smaller models after export to OpenVINO representation using Optimum Intel. Stable Diffusion topology is decomposed into Encoder, Diffuser and Decoder. The most interesting model here is Diffuser because it’s the one responsible for denoising of the latent image representation. This generation stage is repeated several times, so it is the most computationally intensive, which mostly effects on the generation time of the image. Whisper is also decomposed into Encoder and Decoder, which also contain SDPA patterns. The Encoder encodes the spectrogram from the feature extractor to form a sequence of encoder hidden states. Then, the decoder autoregressively predicts text tokens, conditional on both the previous tokens and the encoder hidden states. Currently, Snippets support efficient execution of SDPA only in Whisper Encoder, while Decoder is a subject for future support. To evaluate the inference performance of Stable Diffusion and Whisper models, we collect generation time of image/speech using LLM Benchmark from openvino.genai. This script provides a unified approach to estimate performance for GenAI workloads in OpenVINO.

Performance Improvements

Note that the main goal of these experiments is to estimate the impact of Snippets on the performance of the dynamic pipeline. To do that, we performed two series of experiments for every model. The first version of experiments is with disabled Snippets tokenization. In this case, all operations from the SDPA pattern are performed on the CPU plugin side as stand-alone operations. The second variant of experiments — with enabled Snippets tokenization. The relative difference between numbers collected on these two series of experiments is our performance metric — speedup, the higher the better. Firstly, let’s take a closer look at the resulting speedups for the BERT models which are depicted on Fig. 5.

The speedups on RPL range from 3 to 18%, while on average the models are accelerated by 7%. The ARL-S speedups are somewhat higher and reach 20–25% for some models, the average acceleration factor is around 9%. The most affected platform is SPR, it has the highest average speedup of 15 %.

One can easily see from these numbers that both average and maximum speedups depend on the platform. To understand the reason for this variation, we should recall that the main optimizations delivered by Snippets are vertical fusion and tiling. These optimizations improve cache locality and reduce the memory access overheads. Note SPR has the largest caches among the examined platforms. It also uses BF16 precision that takes two times less space per data element compared to F32 used on ARL-S and RPL. Finally, SPR has AMX ISA extension that allows it to perform matrix multiplications much faster. As a result, SDPA execution was more memory bound on SPR, so this platform benefited the most from the Snippets enablement. At the same time, the model speedups on ARL-S and RPL are almost on the same level. These platforms use FP32 inference precision while SPR uses BF16, and they have less cache size than SPR.

Now, let’s consider Stable Diffusion and Whisper topologies and compare their speedups with some of BERT-like models. As can be seen from the Fig. 6, the most accelerated Stable Diffusion topology is StableDiffusion-3-medium — almost 33% on ARL-S and 40% on SPR. The most accelerated model in this Stable Diffusion pipeline is Diffuser. This model has made a great contribution to speeding up the entire image generation time. The reason the Diffuser benefits more from Snippets enablement is that they use larger sequence lengths and embedding sizes. It means that their attention blocks process more data and are more memory constrained compared to BERT-like models. As a result, the Diffuser models in Stable Diffusion benefit more from the increased cache locality provided by Snippets. This effect is more pronounced on the SPR than on the ARL-S and RPL for the reasons discussed above (cache sizes, BF16, AMX).

The second most accelerated model is whisper-large-v3–30% on SPR. This model has more parameters than base and tiny models and process more Mel spectrogram frequency bins than they. It means that Encoder of whisper-large-v3 attention blocks processes more data, like Diffuser part of Stable Diffusion topologies. By the same reasons, whisper-large-v3 benefits more (increased cache locality provided by Snippets).

Memory Consumption Improvements

Another important improvement from Snippets using is reduction of memory consumption. Snippets use vertical fusion and various optimizations from Memory Usage Optimizations block (see the paragraph “Lowering Pipeline” in “Architecture” above for more details). Due to this fact, Subgraphs tokenized by Snippets consumes less memory than the same operations performed as stand-alone in CPU Plugin.

Let’s take a look at the Fig. 7 where we can see improvements in image generation memory consumption using Stable Diffusion pipelines from Snippets usage. As discussed above, the attention blocks in the Diffuser models from these pipelines process more data and consume more memory. Because of that, the greatest impact on memory consumption from using Snippets is seen on Stable Diffusion pipelines. For example, memory consumption of image generation is reduced by 25–50% on RPL and ARL-S platforms with FP32 inference precision and by 15–30% on SPR with BF16 inference precision.

Thus, one of the major improvements from using Snippets is memory consumption reduction. It allows extending the range of platforms which are capable to infer such memory-intensive models as Stable Diffusion.

Conclusion

Snippets is a JIT compiler used by OpenVINO to optimize performance-critical subgraphs. We briefly discussed Snippets’ lowering pipeline and the modifications made to enable dynamism support. After these changes, Snippets generate shape-agnostic kernels that can be used for various input shapes without recompilation.

This design was tested on realistic use cases across several platforms. As a result, we demonstrate that Snippets can accelerate BERT-like models by up to 25%, Stable Diffusion and Whisper pipelines up to 40%. Additionally, Snippets can significantly reduce memory consumption by several tens of percent. Notably, these improvements result from more optimal hardware utilization, so the models’ accuracy remains unaffected.

References

Model list can be found here: https://gist.github.com/a-sidorova/2c2aa584922389138e5ccbad0e0c773b

Intel Xeon Gold 6430L: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/231737/intel-xeon-gold-6430-processor-60m-cache-2-10-ghz/specifications.html

Intel Core i9-13900K: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/230496/intel-core-i913900k-processor-36m-cache-up-to-5-80-ghz/specifications.html

Intel Core Ultra 7 265K: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241063/intel-core-ultra-7-processor-265k-30m-cache-up-to-5-50-ghz/specifications.html

Notices & Disclaimers

Performance varies by use, configuration, and other factors. Learn more on the Performance Index site.

No product or component can be absolutely secure. Your costs and results may vary. Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software or service activation.

© Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries.

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Authors: Tong Qiu, Xiake Sun

Starting with OpenVINO.GenAI 2025.1, the C API has been introduced, primarily to enhance interoperability with other programming languages, enabling developers to more effectively utilize OpenVINO-based generative AI across diverse coding environments.

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Compared to C++, C's ABI is more stable, often serving as an interface layer or bridge language for cross-language interoperability and integration. This allows developers to leverage the performance benefits of C++ in the backend while using other high-level languages for easier implementation and integration.

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As a milestone, we have currently delivered only the LLMPipeline and its associated C API interface. If you have other requirements or encounter any issues during usage, please submit an issue to OpenVINO.GenAI

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‍Currently, we have implemented a Go application Ollama using the C API (Please refer to https://blog.openvino.ai/blog-posts/ollama-integrated-with-openvino-accelerating-deepseek-inference), which includes more comprehensive features such as performance benchmarking for developers reference.

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Now, let's dive into the design logic of the C API, using a .NET C# example as a case study, based on the Windows platform with .NET 8.0.

Live Demo

Before we dive into the details, let's take a look at the final C# version of the ChatSample, which supports multi-turn conversations. Below is a live demo

How to Build a Chat Sample by C#

P/Invoke: Wrapping Unmanaged Code in .NET

First, the official GenAI C API can be found in this folder https://github.com/openvinotoolkit/openvino.genai/tree/master/src/c/include/openvino/genai/c . We also provide several pure C samples https://github.com/openvinotoolkit/openvino.genai/tree/master/samples/c/text_generation . Now, we will build our own C# Chat Sample based on the chat_sample_c. This sample can facilitate multi-turn conversations with the LLM.

C# can access structures, functions and callbacks in the unmanaged library openvino_genai_c.dll through P/Invoke. This example demonstrates how to invoke unmanaged functions from managed code.

public static class NativeMethods
{
 DllImport("openvino_genai_c.dll", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl)]
public static extern ov_status_e ov_genai_llm_pipeline_create(
        [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPStr)] string models_path,
        [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPStr)] string device,
        out IntPtr pipe);

[DllImport("openvino_genai_c.dll", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl)]
public static extern void ov_genai_llm_pipeline_free(IntPtr pipeline);

//Other methods

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The dynamic library openvino_genai_c.dll is imported, which relies on openvino_genai.dll. CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl here corresponds to the default calling convention _cdecl in C, which defines the argument-passing order, stack-maintenance responsibility, and name-decoration convention. For more details, refer to Argument Passing and Naming Conventions.

Additionally, the return value ov_status_e reuses an enum type from openvino_c.dll to indicate the execution status of the function. We need to implement a corresponding enum type in C#, such as

public enum ov_status_e
{
    OK = 0,
    GENERAL_ERROR = -1,
    NOT_IMPLEMENTED = -2,
    //...

}

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Next, we will implement our C# LLMPipeline, which inherits the IDisposable interface. This means that its instances require cleanup after use to release the unmanaged resources they occupy. In practice, object allocation and deallocation for native pointers are handled through the C interface provided by OpenVINO.GenAI. The OpenVINO.GenAI library takes full responsibility for memory management, which ensures memory safety and eliminates the risk of manual memory errors.

public class LlmPipeline : IDisposable
{
    private IntPtr _nativePtr;

    public LlmPipeline(string modelPath, string device)
    {
        var status = NativeMethods.ov_genai_llm_pipeline_create(modelPath, device, out _nativePtr);
        if (_nativePtr == IntPtr.Zero || status != ov_status_e.OK)
        {
            Console.WriteLine($"Error: {status} when creating LLM pipeline.");
            throw new Exception("Failed to create LLM pipeline.");
        }

        Console.WriteLine("LLM pipeline created successfully!");
    }

    public void Dispose()
    {
        if (_nativePtr != IntPtr.Zero)
        {
            NativeMethods.ov_genai_llm_pipeline_free(_nativePtr);
            _nativePtr = IntPtr.Zero;
        }

        GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
    }
    // Other Methods
}

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Callback Implementation

Next, let's implement the most complex method of the LLMPipeline, the GenerateStream method. This method encapsulates the LLM inference process. Let's take a look at the original C code. The result can be retrieved either via ov_genai_decoded_results or streamer_callback. ov_genai_decoded_results provides the inference result all at once, while streamer_callback allows for streaming inference results. ov_genai_decoded_results or streamer_callback must be non-NULL; neither can be NULL at the same time. For more information please refer to the comments https://github.com/openvinotoolkit/openvino.genai/blob/master/src/c/include/openvino/genai/c/llm_pipeline.h

// code snippets from //https://github.com/openvinotoolkit/openvino.genai/blob/master/src/c/include/openvino/genai/c/llm_// pipeline.h 
typedef enum {
    OV_GENAI_STREAMMING_STATUS_RUNNING = 0,  // Continue to run inference
    OV_GENAI_STREAMMING_STATUS_STOP =
        1,  // Stop generation, keep history as is, KV cache includes last request and generated tokens
    OV_GENAI_STREAMMING_STATUS_CANCEL = 2  // Stop generate, drop last prompt and all generated tokens from history, KV
                                           // cache includes history but last step
} ov_genai_streamming_status_e;

// ...
typedef struct {
    ov_genai_streamming_status_e(
        OPENVINO_C_API_CALLBACK* callback_func)(const char* str, void* args);  //!< Pointer to the callback function
    void* args;  //!< Pointer to the arguments passed to the callback function
} streamer_callback;

// ...
OPENVINO_GENAI_C_EXPORTS ov_status_e ov_genai_llm_pipeline_generate(ov_genai_llm_pipeline* pipe,
                                                                    const char* inputs,
                                                                    const ov_genai_generation_config* config,
                                                                    const streamer_callback* streamer,
                                                                    ov_genai_decoded_results** results);

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The streamer_callback structure includes not only the callback function itself, but also an additional void* args for enhanced flexibility. This design allows developers to pass custom context or state information to the callback.

For example, in C++ it's common to pass a this pointer through args, enabling the callback function to access class members or methods when invoked.

// args is a this pointer
void callback_func(const char* str, void* args) {
    MyClass* self = static_cast<MyClass*>(args);
    self->DoSomething();
}

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This C# code defines a class StreamerCallback that helps connect a C callback function with a C# method. It wraps a C function pointer MyCallbackDelegate and a void* args into a struct.

- ToNativePTR method constructs the streamer_callback structure, allocates a block of memory, and copies the structure's data into it, allowing it to be passed to a native C function.

- GCHandle is used to safely pin the C# object so that it can be passed as a native pointer to unmanaged C code.

- CallbackWrapper method is the actual function that C code will call.

[UnmanagedFunctionPointer(CallingConvention.Cdecl)]
public delegate ov_genai_streamming_status_e MyCallbackDelegate(IntPtr str, IntPtr args);

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
public struct streamer_callback
{
    public MyCallbackDelegate callback_func;
    public IntPtr args;
}
public class StreamerCallback : IDisposable
{
    public Action<string> OnStream;
    public MyCallbackDelegate Delegate;
    private GCHandle _selfHandle;

    public StreamerCallback(Action<string> onStream)
    {
        OnStream = onStream;
        Delegate = new MyCallbackDelegate(CallbackWrapper);
        _selfHandle = GCHandle.Alloc(this); 
    }

    public IntPtr ToNativePtr()
    {
        var native = new streamer_callback
        {
            callback_func = Delegate,
            args = GCHandle.ToIntPtr(_selfHandle)
        };

        IntPtr ptr = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(Marshal.SizeOf<streamer_callback>());
        Marshal.StructureToPtr(native, ptr, false);
        return ptr;
    }

    public void Dispose()
    {
        if (_selfHandle.IsAllocated)
            _selfHandle.Free();
    }

    private ov_genai_streamming_status_e CallbackWrapper(IntPtr str, IntPtr args)
    {
        string content = Marshal.PtrToStringAnsi(str) ?? string.Empty;

        if (args != IntPtr.Zero)
        {
            var handle = GCHandle.FromIntPtr(args);
            if (handle.Target is StreamerCallback self)
            {
                self.OnStream?.Invoke(content);
            }
        }

        return ov_genai_streamming_status_e.OV_GENAI_STREAMMING_STATUS_RUNNING;
    }
}

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Then We implemented the GenerateStream method in class LLMPipeline.

 public void GenerateStream(string input, GenerationConfig config, StreamerCallback? callback = null)
 {
     IntPtr configPtr = config.GetNativePointer();
     IntPtr decodedPtr;// placeholder

     IntPtr streamerPtr = IntPtr.Zero;

     if (callback != null)
     {
         streamerPtr = callback.ToNativePtr();
     }

     var status = NativeMethods.ov_genai_llm_pipeline_generate(
         _nativePtr,
         input,
         configPtr,
         streamerPtr,  
         out decodedPtr
     );

     if (streamerPtr != IntPtr.Zero)
         Marshal.FreeHGlobal(streamerPtr);

     callback?.Dispose();

     if (status != ov_status_e.OK)
     {
         Console.WriteLine($"Error: {status} during generation.");
         throw new Exception("Failed to generate results.");
     }
     return;
 }

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We use the following code to invoke our callback and GenerateStream.

pipeline.StartChat(); // Start chat with keeping history in kv cache.

Console.WriteLine("question:");
while (true)
{
    string? input = Console.ReadLine();
    if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(input)) break; 

    using var streamerCallback = new StreamerCallback((string chunk) =>
    {
        Console.Write(chunk); 
    });

    pipeline.GenerateStream(input, generationConfig, streamerCallback);
    
    input = null;
    Console.WriteLine("\n----------\nquestion:");
}

pipeline.FinishChat(); // Finish chat and clear history in kv cache.

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About Deployment

We can directly download the OpenVINO official release of the LLM's IR from Hugging Face using this link.

git clone https://huggingface.co/OpenVINO/Phi-3.5-mini-instruct-int8-ov

‍

The OpenVINO.GenAI 2025.1 package can be downloaded via this link.

The C# project directly depends on openvino_genai_c.dll, which in turn has transitive dependencies on other toolkit-related DLLs, including Intel TBB libraries.

To ensure proper runtime behavior, all the DLLs delivered with OpenVINO.GenAI — including openvino_genai_c.dll and its dependencies — are bundled and treated as part of the C# project’s runtime dependencies.

We use the following cmd commands to download the genai package and copy all the required dependent DLLs to the directory containing the *.csproj file.

curl -O https://storage.openvinotoolkit.org/repositories/openvino_genai/packages/2025.1/windows/openvino_genai_windows_2025.1.0.0_x86_64.zip
tar -xzvf openvino_genai_windows_2025.1.0.0_x86_64.zip
xcopy /y openvino_genai_windows_2025.1.0.0_x86_64\runtime\bin\intel64\Release\*.dll "C:\path\to\ChatSample\"
xcopy /y openvino_genai_windows_2025.1.0.0_x86_64\runtime\3rdparty\tbb\bin\*.dll "C:\path\to\ChatSample\"

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Full Implementation

Please refer to https://github.com/apinge/openvino_ai_practice/tree/main/ov_genai_interop/ov_genai_interop_net, to access the full implementation.

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