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# 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 [`~optimum.onnxruntime.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.