# Accelerating Qwen3-8B Agent on Intel® Core™ Ultra with Depth-Pruned Draft Models

DevFeed: [Accelerating Qwen3-8B Agent on Intel® Core™ Ultra with Depth-Pruned Draft Models](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/accelerating-qwen3-8b-agent-on-intel-coretm-ultra-with-depth-pruned-draft-models-7292.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://huggingface.co/blog/intel-qwen3-agent>)

Author: Igor Margulis; Ofir Zafrir; Shira Guskin; Guy Boudoukh; Pedro Cuenca

Published: 2025-09-29T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Hugging Face - Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/hugging-face-blog.md>)

Topics: [qwen](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/qwen.md>), [AI Agent](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai-agent.md>), [Inference](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/inference.md>), [intel](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/intel.md>), [smolagents](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/smolagents.md>), [GPU](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/gpu.md>), [Latency](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/latency.md>)

Tags: [ai-agent](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-agent.md>), [gpu](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/gpu.md>), [guide](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/guide.md>), [hub](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/hub.md>), [inference](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/inference.md>), [intel](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/intel.md>), [latency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/latency.md>), [llm](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/llm.md>), [models](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/models.md>), [nlp](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/nlp.md>), [qwen](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/qwen.md>), [smolagents](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/smolagents.md>)

## AI overview

The article explains how to accelerate the Qwen3-8B agent on an Intel Lunar Lake integrated GPU using OpenVINO.GenAI. Speculative decoding with Qwen3-0.6B as a draft model achieves about a 1.3x speedup, while pruning the draft model increases the speedup to about 1.4x. It also demonstrates running a fast, local AI agent with smolagents.

## Source excerpt

We're on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.