Quantization Formats Face-Off: Matching the Right Tool to Your Hardware

Quantization is essential for deploying large models on memory-constrained hardware, but the format you choose determines critical trade-offs between hardware compatibility, inference speed, and model accuracy. GGUF optimizes for CPU and Apple Silicon, GPTQ for GPU batch serving, and AWQ for accuracy preservation—each targets a different deployment scenario. Selecting the wrong format can leave performance on the table or create incompatibilities that derail your deployment pipeline.