howtospark
Training

SmoothQuant

Reduce model sizeQuantizationReference

Migrates activation outliers into the weights to unlock W8A8.

Objective
Reduce model size · Lossy
Relieves
ComputeBandwidth
Targets
Weights · Activations
Format
W8A8 (INT8)
Granularity
Per-channel scaling
Lifecycle
PTQ · no gradients
Calibration
Small calibration set
Compression
~2×
Quality
Near-FP16 at W8A8
Hardware
INT8 tensor cores
Runtimes
vLLMTensorRT-LLM
In the wild
AngelSlim FP8/INT8 quantization (Tencent)

Static/dynamic FP8 and dynamic INT8 W8A8 recipes with published accuracy tables — the low-drama 2× shrink tier.

A worked Spark recipe for this method hasn't been written yet — it lives here as a reference point in the ontology.