Good pricing for 16gb vram. Can see that finding a use for some home servers.
Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations
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Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations
#12Huh, I didn't realize these were just released, I came across it looking for a GPU that had AV1 hardware encoding and been putting a shopping cart together for a mini-ITX xeon server for all my ffmpeg shenanigans. I like to Buy American when I can but it's hard to find out which fabs various CPUs and GPUs are made in. I read Kingston does some RAM here and Crucial some SSDs. Maybe the silicon is fabbed here but every…
You may want to check that your Xeon may already support hardware encoding of AV1 in the iGPU. I saved a bundle building a media server when I realized the iGPU was more than sufficient (and more efficient) than chucking a GPU in the case.
I have a service that runs continuously and reencodes any videos I have into h265 and the iGPU barely even notices it.
Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations
#13Not bad with 16 GB VRAM, a bit disappointing on performance though, looking at the Blender 3D (open source) benchmarks: https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=...
It clocks in at 1503.4 samples per second, behind the NVidia RTX 2060 (1590.93 samples / sec, released Jan 2019), AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT (1539, May 2022), and Apple M3 Pro GPU 14 cores (1651.85, Oct 2023).
Note that this perf comparison is just ray-tracing rendering, useful for games, but might give some clarity on performance comparisons with its competition.
Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations
#14It’s interesting that it uses 4 Display Ports and not a single HDMI. Is HDMI seen as a “gaming” feature, or is DP seen as a “workstation” interface? Ultimately HDMI is a brand that commands higher royalties than DP, so I suspect this decision was largely chosen to minimize costs. I wonder what percentage of the target audience has HDMI only displays.
HDMI requires paying license fees. DP is an open standard.
As far as things I care about go, the HDMI Forum’s overt hostility[1] to open-source drivers is the important part, but it would indeed be interesting to know what Intel cared about there.
(Note that some self-described “open” standards are not royalty-free, only RAND-licensed by somebody’s definiton of “R” and “ND”. And some don’t have their text available free of charge, either, let alone have a development process open to all comers. I believe the only thing the phrase “open standard” reliably implies at this point is that access to the text does not require signing an NDA.
DisplayPort in particular is royalty-free—although of course with patents you can never really know—while legal access to the text is gated[2] behind a VESA membership with dues based on the company revenue—I can’t find the official formula, but Wikipedia claims $5k/yr minimum.)
[1] https://hackaday.com/2023/07/11/displayport-a-better-video-i...
Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations
#15It’s interesting that it uses 4 Display Ports and not a single HDMI. Is HDMI seen as a “gaming” feature, or is DP seen as a “workstation” interface? Ultimately HDMI is a brand that commands higher royalties than DP, so I suspect this decision was largely chosen to minimize costs. I wonder what percentage of the target audience has HDMI only displays.
There are inexpensive ($10ish) converters that do DP > HDMI, but the inverse is much more expensive ($50-100)
Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations
#16It’s interesting that it uses 4 Display Ports and not a single HDMI. Is HDMI seen as a “gaming” feature, or is DP seen as a “workstation” interface? Ultimately HDMI is a brand that commands higher royalties than DP, so I suspect this decision was largely chosen to minimize costs. I wonder what percentage of the target audience has HDMI only displays.
HDMI also blocked open source driver by AMD.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/02/hdmi_blocks_amd_foss/
Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations
#17https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-pro-b50-linux
>Overall the Intel Arc Pro B50 was at 1.47x the performance of the NVIDIA RTX A1000 with that mix of OpenGL, Vulkan, and OpenCL/Vulkan compute workloads both synthetic and real-world tests. That is just under Intel's own reported Windows figures of the Arc Pro B50 delivering 1.6x the performance of the RTX A1000 for graphics and 1.7x the performance of the A1000 for AI inference. This is all the more impressive when considering the Arc Pro B50 price of $349+ compared to the NVIDIA RTX A1000 at $420+.
Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations
#18It’s interesting that it uses 4 Display Ports and not a single HDMI. Is HDMI seen as a “gaming” feature, or is DP seen as a “workstation” interface? Ultimately HDMI is a brand that commands higher royalties than DP, so I suspect this decision was largely chosen to minimize costs. I wonder what percentage of the target audience has HDMI only displays.
There are inexpensive ($10ish) converters that do DP > HDMI, but the inverse is much more expensive ($50-100)
That's because DP sources can (and nearly always do) support encoding HDMI as a secondary mode, so all you need is a passive adapter. Going the other way requires active conversion.
I assume you have to pay HDMI royalties for DP ports which support the full HDMI spec, but older HDMI versions were supersets of DVI, so you can encode a basic HDMI compatible signal without stepping on their IP.
Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations
#19It’s interesting that it uses 4 Display Ports and not a single HDMI. Is HDMI seen as a “gaming” feature, or is DP seen as a “workstation” interface? Ultimately HDMI is a brand that commands higher royalties than DP, so I suspect this decision was largely chosen to minimize costs. I wonder what percentage of the target audience has HDMI only displays.
DisplayPort is the interface most gaming monitors use. If you don't need ARC or CEC, mostly used for home theater builds, DisplayPort is preferable.
Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations
#20A $350 “workstation” GPU with 16 GB of VRAM? I... guess, but is that really enough for the kinds of things that would have you looking for workstation-level GPUs in the first place?
The closest comparable on the Nvidia side is the RTX Pro 2000 which is 16GB vram for $650 (and likely more compute).