For more information, do take a look at Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ Toolkit

Updated, Cleaner API

• The new OpenVINO API 2.0 was introduced, which aligns OpenVINO inputs and outputs with frameworks. Input and output tensors use native framework layouts and element types. 
• The API parameters in Model Optimizer have been reduced to minimize complexity. Performance has been significantly improved for model conversion on Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX*) models.

Broader Model Support

• With Dynamic Input Shapes capabilities on CPU, OpenVINO is able to adapt to multiple input dimensions in a single model providing more complete NLP support. Support for Dynamic Shapes on additional XPUs is expected in a future dot release.
• New models with a focus on NLP and a new category, Anomaly Detection, and support for conversion and inference of select PaddlePaddle* models:
  • Pretrained models for anomaly segmentation focus on industrial inspection making speech denoising trainable, plus updates on speech recognition and speech synthesis
  • Combined demonstration that includes noise reduction, speech recognition, question answering, translation, and text to speech
  • Public models with a focus on NLP ContextNet, Speech-Transformer, HiFi-GAN, Glow-TTS, FastSpeech2, and Wav2Vec

Portability and Performance

• New AUTO plug-in self-discovers available system inferencing capacity based on model requirements so applications no longer need to know their compute environment in advance.
• Automatic batching functionality via code hints automatically scale batch size based on XPU and available memory.
• Built with 12th generation Intel® Core™ processors (formerly code named Alder Lake) in mind. Supports the hybrid architecture necessary to deliver enhancements for high performance inferencing on CPUs and integrated GPUs.