ASRock released a special AI tool a few years back that gave users the ability to easily and quickly deploy AI applications on PCs with supported AMD or Intel GPUs. The board maker has announced its second iteration of the app, known as AI Quickset WSL, that further enhances the tool's capabilities. Giving users an environment that can easily deploy AI apps made specifically for Linux on Windows machines without dealing with a complicated setup process.
The app takes advantage of Microsoft's WSL virtual compatibility layer to achieve this. WSL is essentially a GUI-less virtual machine natively supported in the latest versions of Windows that allows users to run Linux apps in Windows through virtualization. AI Quickset WSL is built on AMD's ROCm platform to provide all the necessary setup configuration to run Linux AI-based apps efficiently on AMD's RX 7900 series GPUs or newer.
ASRock's tool is designed to automate all of the complicated parts of running AI applications on Windows. Depending on the method, installing and running AI models on a PC can be tough. You need to account for what hardware you have and what runtime(s) that hardware supports. You might also need to manually tweak the LLM's optimizations under the hood so it runs well on your hardware, if you're going with a manual setup.
Making matters worse, most "cutting-edge" AI applications are typically optimized for Linux, making it even harder for Windows users to get these apps up and running in Windows (if at all). AI QuickSet WSL essentially turns the process of running AI apps into a simplified wizard, with a GUI that provides a step-by-step process for whatever model you want to run (so long as it's also supported by AI QuickSet WSL). ASRock's app also includes several AI models ready to be used, such as audio, image, text, and object translators and detectors.
The original version of AI Quickset was only capable of configuring AI applications that were designed with either Windows or Linux in mind. AI Quickset WSL expands upon this and again allows users the freedom to run Linux-based AI apps on Windows, which is a huge deal if you dabble in AI models that are mostly regulated to the Linux space. But, just like most AI software, AI Quickset's minimum hardware requirements are high, requiring either Intel 12th Gen or newer or AMD Ryzen 5000 or newer CPUs, 64GB of memory, and ASRock's RX 7900 series or later graphics cards.
