The Phase 8 fast transformer_quant path materialises the dense bf16 transformer on
the GPU and torchao-quantises it in place, so its load peak is ~2x GGUF's (~21 vs
13.4 GB) plus a ~12 GB download. Add a pre-quantized branch: quantise once offline
(scripts/build_prequant_checkpoint.py) and at runtime build the transformer skeleton
on the meta device (accelerate.init_empty_weights) and load_state_dict(assign=True)
the quantized weights, so the dense bf16 never touches the GPU.
Measured (B200, Z-Image fp8): full-pipeline GPU load peak 21.2 -> 14.6 GB (matching
GGUF's 13.4), on-disk 12 -> 6.28 GB, output bit-identical (LPIPS 0.0). It is the same
torchao config + min_features filter the runtime path uses, applied ahead of time.
New core/inference/diffusion_prequant.py (resolve_prequant_source +
load_prequantized_transformer, best-effort, lazy imports). diffusion.py
_load_dense_quant_pipeline tries the pre-quant source first and falls back to the
dense materialise+quantise path, then to GGUF, so the default is unchanged.
DiffusionLoadRequest gains transformer_prequant_path; DiffusionFamily gains an empty
prequant_repos map for hosted checkpoints (hosting deferred). Hermetic CPU tests for
the resolver, the meta-init+assign loader, and the backend branch selection +
fallbacks; GPU verification via scripts/verify_prequant_backend.py.
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