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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

#61
post #12

Huh, 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.

What recent Xeon has the iGPU? Didn't they stop including them ~5 years ago?

Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#63

The new CEO of Intel has said that Intel is giving up competing with Nvidia. Why would you bother with any Intel product with an attitude like that, gives zero confidence in the company. What business is Intel in, if not competing with Nvidia and AMD. Is it giving up competing with AMD too?

I don't really want an nvidia gpu; it's too expensive and I won't use most of it. This actually looks attractive.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#64

Huh, 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…

I have the answer for you, Intel's GPU chips are on TSMC's process. They are not made in Intel-owned fabs.

There really is no such thing as "buying American" in the computer hardware industry unless you are talking about the designs rather than the assembly. There are also critical parts of the lithography process that depend on US technology, which is why the US is able to enforce certain sanctions (and due to some alliances with other countries that own the other parts of the process).

Personally I think people get way too worked up about being protectionist when it comes to global trade. We all want to buy our own country's products over others but we definitely wouldn't like it if other countries stopped buying our exported products.

When Apple sells an iPhone in China (and they sure buy a lot of them), Apple is making most of the money in that transaction by a large margin, and in turn so are you since your 401k is probably full of Apple stock, and so are the 60+% of Americans who invest in the stock market. A typical iPhone user will give Apple more money in profit from services than the profit from the sale of the actual device. The value is really not in the hardware assembly.

In the case of electronics products like this, almost the entire value add is in the design of the chip and the software that is running on it, which represents all the high-wage work, and a whole lot of that labor in the US.

US citizens really shouldn't envy a job where people are sitting at an electronics bench doing repetitive assembly work for 12 hours a day in a factory wishing we had more of those jobs in our country. They should instead be focused on making high level education more available/affordable so that they stay on top of the economic food chain, where most/all of its citizens are doing high-value work rather than causing education to be expensive and beg foreign manufacturers to open satellite factories to employ our uneducated masses.

I think the current wave of populist protectionist ideology is essentially blaming the wrong causes of declining affordability and increasing inequality for the working class. Essentially, people think that bringing the manufacturing jobs back and reversing globalism will right the ship on income inequality, but the reality is that the reason that equality was so good for Americans m in the mid-century was because the wealthy were taxed heavily, European manufacturing was decimated in WW2, and labor was in high demand.

The above of course is all my opinion on the situation, and a rather long tangent.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#65
I really hope Intel continues with GPUs or the GPU market is doomed until China catches up, Nvidia produces good products with great software, best in industry really, with great length support, but that doesn't excuse them from monopolistic practices. The fact that AMD refuses to compete really makes it look like this entire thing is organized from the top (US government).

This reminds me a lot of the LLM craze and how they wanted to charge so much for simple usage at the start until China released deepseek. Ideally we shouldn't rely on China but do we have a choice? the entire US economy has become reliant on monopolies to keep their insanely high stock prices and profit margins

Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#66
post #12

Huh, 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.

Looks like Core Ultra is the only chip with integrated Arc GPU with AV1 encode. The Xeon series I was looking at, the 1700 socket so the e2400s, definitely don't have iGPU. (The fact that the motherboard I'm looking at only has VGA is probably a clue xD)

I'll have to consider pros and cons with Ultra chips, thanks for the tip.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#67
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HDMI is still valuable for those of us who use KVMs. Cheap Display port KVMs don't have EDID emulation and expensive Display Port KVMs just don't work (in my experience).

The only well-reviewed DisplayPort KVMs I'm aware of are from Level1Techs: https://www.store.level1techs.com/products/kvm Not cheap though. And also not 100% caveat-free.

I have one and it still sucks. I ordered it after the one I bought on Amazon kind of sucked thinking the L1T would be better and it was worse than the Amazon one.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#68
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HDMI is still valuable for those of us who use KVMs. Cheap Display port KVMs don't have EDID emulation and expensive Display Port KVMs just don't work (in my experience).

The only well-reviewed DisplayPort KVMs I'm aware of are from Level1Techs: https://www.store.level1techs.com/products/kvm Not cheap though. And also not 100% caveat-free.

And even those still require a https://www.store.level1techs.com/products/p/dp-repeater-hdm... per port to make it so the computer doesn't detect the monitor switching away.

I have a Level1Techs hdmi KVM and it's awesome, and I'd totally buy a display port one once it has built in EDID cloners, but even at their super premium price point, it's just not something they're willing to do yet.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#69
post #59

Kinda bummed that it’s $50 more than originally said. But if it works well, a single slot card that can be powered by the PCIe slot is super valuable. Hoping there will be some affordable prebuilds so I can run some MoE LLM models.

Competing workstation cards like the RTX A2000 also do not need power connectors.

"competing" means 12GB of VRAM at a 600ish price point though...

Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#70
post #64

Huh, 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…

I have the answer for you, Intel's GPU chips are on TSMC's process. They are not made in Intel-owned fabs. There really is no such thing as "buying American" in the computer hardware industry unless you are talking about the designs rather than the assembly. There are also critical parts of the lithography process that depend on US technology, which is why the US is able to enforce certain sanctions (and due to some…

Thanks for that perspective. I am just in a place of puzzling why none of this says Made in USA on it. I can get socks and tshirts woven in north carolina which is nice, and furniture made in illinois. That's all a resurgence of 'arts & craft' I suppose, valuing a product made in small batches by someone passionate about quality instead of just getting whatever is lowest cost. Suppose there's not much in the way of artisan silicon yet :)

EDIT: I did think of, what is the closest thing to artisan silicon and thought of the POWER9 CPUs and found out those are made in USA Talos II is also manufactured in the US with the IBM POWER9 processors being fabbed in New York while the Raptor motherboard is manufactured in Texas along with where their systems are assembled.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/power9-threadripper-core9

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