Hardware requirements to run Stable Diffusion

This section will discuss the hardware requirements of running a Stable Diffusion model. This book will cover Stable Diffusion v1.5 and the Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) version. These two are also the most used models at the time of writing this book.

Stable Diffusion v1.5, released in October 2022, is considered a general-purpose model, and can be used interchangeably with v1.4. On the other hand, SDXL, which was released in July 2023, is known for its ability to handle higher resolutions more effectively compared to Stable Diffusion v1.5. It can generate images with larger dimensions without compromising on quality.

Essentially, Stable Diffusion is a set of models that includes the following:

• Tokenizer: This tokenizes a text prompt into a sequence of tokens.
• Text Encoder: The Stable Diffusion text encoder is a special Transformer language model – specifically, the text encoder of a CLIP model. In SDXL, a larger...