Okay... what's the downside?
Apples to oranges, they're comparing 11 hours on a Raspberry Pi Zero to:
- 10 seconds on Intel i7-13700
- 3 seconds on Intel i9-9990XE
- 5 seconds on Ryzen 9-5900X
Additionally, the 2048 is accomplished by using RealESRGAN to 2x, which isn't close to what a native 2048 diffuser's quality would be.
It does look interesting and is an achievement, in terms of, it's hard to write this stuff from scratch, much less in pure C++ without relying on GPU.