Stable Diffusion OpenVINO is an implementation of the Stable Diffusion text-to-image model optimized for Intel hardware with the OpenVINO toolkit. It lets users generate images on Intel CPUs and integrated GPUs – machines without a discrete NVIDIA graphics card – by running the diffusion pipeline through Intel’s inference runtime. It is an open-source project on GitHub with around 1,500 stars.
When Stable Diffusion first appeared, most implementations assumed a CUDA GPU, leaving Intel-only laptops and mini PCs out. This project converts the model for OpenVINO and provides a straightforward pipeline and demo for text-to-image generation, including the text encoder, UNet and VAE stages running under the OpenVINO runtime. For many users it was the practical way to try diffusion image generation on ordinary hardware, and it remains a compact reference for deploying diffusion models with OpenVINO.
The project is free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license, and OpenVINO itself is free from Intel.
Users and developers with Intel-based machines who want local text-to-image generation without buying a discrete GPU.
This implementation appeared in 2022, when running Stable Diffusion without an NVIDIA GPU was a common frustration, and it was demonstrated generating images on ordinary Intel laptops and NUC mini PCs. It converts the original PyTorch weights into OpenVINO’s intermediate representation once, then reuses them for fast inference sessions, and the code is compact enough to serve as a teaching example for how diffusion pipelines map onto inference runtimes.