What This Demonstrates
ONNX Export — Converts PyTorch model to a hardware-agnostic format. ONNX Runtime applies graph optimizations (operator fusion, memory planning) that PyTorch doesn't do by default.
INT8 Quantization — Reduces weight precision from 32-bit floats to 8-bit integers. 4x smaller model, faster memory bandwidth, same accuracy on most NLP tasks.
Why it matters — AI accelerator teams (like HCL's) optimize model inference for deployment at scale. These techniques are the foundation of production ML systems.