# CPU

CPUs are a viable and cost-effective inference option. With a few optimization methods, it is possible to achieve good performance with large models on CPUs. These methods include fusing kernels to reduce overhead and compiling your code to a faster intermediate format that can be deployed in production environments.

This guide will show you a few ways to optimize inference on a CPU.

## Optimum

[Optimum](https://hf.co/docs/optimum/en/index) is a Hugging Face library focused on optimizing model performance across various hardware. It supports [ONNX Runtime](https://onnxruntime.ai/docs/) (ORT), a model accelerator, for a wide range of hardware and frameworks including CPUs.

Optimum provides the `ORTModel` class for loading ONNX models. For example, load the [optimum/roberta-base-squad2](https://hf.co/optimum/roberta-base-squad2) checkpoint for question answering inference. This checkpoint contains a [model.onnx](https://hf.co/optimum/roberta-base-squad2/blob/main/model.onnx) file.

```py
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, pipeline
from optimum.onnxruntime import ORTModelForQuestionAnswering

onnx_qa = pipeline("question-answering", model="optimum/roberta-base-squad2", tokenizer="deepset/roberta-base-squad2")

question = "What's my name?"
context = "My name is Philipp and I live in Nuremberg."
pred = onnx_qa(question, context)
```

> [!TIP]
> Optimum includes an [Intel](https://hf.co/docs/optimum/intel/index) extension that provides additional optimizations such as quantization, pruning, and knowledge distillation for Intel CPUs. This extension also includes tools to convert models to [OpenVINO](https://hf.co/docs/optimum/intel/inference), a toolkit for optimizing and deploying models, for even faster inference.

### BetterTransformer

[BetterTransformer](https://pytorch.org/blog/a-better-transformer-for-fast-transformer-encoder-inference/) is a *fastpath* execution of specialized Transformers functions directly on the hardware level such as a CPU. There are two main components of the fastpath execution.

- fusing multiple operations into a single kernel for faster and more efficient execution
- skipping unnecessary computation of padding tokens with nested tensors

> [!WARNING]
> BetterTransformer isn't supported for all models. Check this [list](https://hf.co/docs/optimum/bettertransformer/overview#supported-models) to see whether a model supports BetterTransformer.

BetterTransformer is available through Optimum with [to_bettertransformer()](/docs/transformers/v4.57.2/en/main_classes/model#transformers.PreTrainedModel.to_bettertransformer).

```py
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("bigscience/bloom")
model = model.to_bettertransformer()
```

## TorchScript

[TorchScript](https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/jit.html) is an intermediate PyTorch model format that can be run in non-Python environments, like C++, where performance is critical. Train a PyTorch model and convert it to a TorchScript function or module with [torch.jit.trace](https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/generated/torch.jit.trace.html). This function optimizes the model with just-in-time (JIT) compilation, and compared to the default eager mode, JIT-compiled models offer better inference performance.

> [!TIP]
> Refer to the [Introduction to PyTorch TorchScript](https://pytorch.org/tutorials/beginner/Intro_to_TorchScript_tutorial.html) tutorial for a gentle introduction to TorchScript.

On a CPU, enable `torch.jit.trace` with the `--jit_mode_eval` flag in [Trainer](/docs/transformers/v4.57.2/en/main_classes/trainer#transformers.Trainer).

```bash
python examples/pytorch/question-answering/run_qa.py \
--model_name_or_path csarron/bert-base-uncased-squad-v1 \
--dataset_name squad \
--do_eval \
--max_seq_length 384 \
--doc_stride 128 \
--output_dir /tmp/ \
--no_cuda \
--jit_mode_eval
```