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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

#111

Post by imiric »

Ekaros wrote: post #95
mythz wrote: post #73

Really confused why the Intel and AMD both continue to struggle and yet still refuse to offer what Nvidia wont, i.e. high ram consumer GPUs. I'd much prefer paying 3x cost for 3x VRAM (48GB/$1047), 6x cost for 6x VRAM (96GB/$2094), 12x cost for 12x VRAM (192GB/$4188), etc. They'd sell like hotcakes and software support would quickly improve. At 16GB I'd still prefer to pay a premium for NVidia GPUs given its superior…

I am not sure there is significant enough market for those. That is selling enough consumer units to cover all design and other costs. From gamer perspective 16GB is now a reasonable point. 32GB is most one would really want and even that not at more than say 100 more price point. This to me is the gamer perspective. This segment really does not need even 32GB, let alone 64GB or more.

> I am not sure there is significant enough market for those.

How so? The prosumer local AI market is quite large and growing every day, and is much more lucrative per capita than the gamer market.

Gamers are an afterthought for GPU manufacturers. NVIDIA has been neglecting the segment for years, and is now much more focused on enterprise and AI workloads. Gamers get marginal performance bumps each generation, and side effect benefits from their AI R&D (DLSS, etc.). The exorbitant prices and performance per dollar are clear indications of this. It's plain extortion, and the worst part is that gamers accepted that paying $1000+ for a GPU is perfectly reasonable.

> This segment really does not need even 32GB, let alone 64GB or more.

4K is becoming a standard resolution, and 16GB is not enough for it. 24GB should be the minimum, and 32GB for some headroom. While it's true that 64GB is overkill for gaming, it would be nice if that would be accessible at reasonable prices. After all, GPUs are not exclusively for gaming, and we might want to run other workloads on them from time to time.

While I can imagine that VRAM manufacturing costs are much higher than DRAM costs, it's not unreasonable to conclude that NVIDIA, possibly in cahoots with AMD, has been artificially controlling the prices. While hardware has always become cheaper and more powerful over time, for some reason, GPUs buck that trend, and old GPUs somehow appreciate over time. Weird, huh. This can't be explained away as post-pandemic tax and chip shortages anymore.

Frankly, I would like some government body to investigate this industry, assuming they haven't been bought out yet. Label me a conspiracy theorist if you wish, but there is precedent for this behavior in many industries.

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

#112

Post by bilekas »

fredoralive wrote: post #105
mythz wrote: post #73

Really confused why the Intel and AMD both continue to struggle and yet still refuse to offer what Nvidia wont, i.e. high ram consumer GPUs. I'd much prefer paying 3x cost for 3x VRAM (48GB/$1047), 6x cost for 6x VRAM (96GB/$2094), 12x cost for 12x VRAM (192GB/$4188), etc. They'd sell like hotcakes and software support would quickly improve. At 16GB I'd still prefer to pay a premium for NVidia GPUs given its superior…

Because the market of people who want huge RAM GPUs for home AI tinkering is basically about 3 Hacker News posters. Who probably won’t buy one because it doesn’t support CUDA. PS5 has something like 16GB unified RAM, and no game is going to really push much beyond that in VRAM use, we don’t really get Crysis style system crushers anymore.

> PS5 has something like 16GB unified RAM, and no game is going to really push much beyond that in VRAM use, we don’t really get Crysis style system crushers anymore.

This isn't really true from the recreational card side, nVidia themselves are reducing the number of 8GB models as a sign of market demand [1]. Games these days are regularly maxing out 6 & 8 GB when running anything above 1080p for 60fps.

The prevalence of Unreal Engine 5 also recently with a low quality of optimization for weaker hardware is causing games to be released basically unplayable for most.

For recreational use the sentiment is that 8GB is scraping the bottom of the requirements. Again this is partly due to bad optimizations, but games are being played in higher resolutions also, which required more memory for larger texture sizes.

[1] https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-reportedly-reduces-supply...

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

#113

Post by askl »

hackerfoo wrote: post #101
wink wrote: post #94

I really wonder who this is for? It's not competing with amd/nvidia at twice the price on terms of performance, but it's also too expensive for a cheap gaming rig. And then there are people who are happy with integrated graphics. Maybe I'm just lacking imagination here, I don't do anything fancy on my work and couch laptops and I have a proper gaming PC.

I’m interested in putting one of these in a server because of the relatively low power usage and compact size.

Why would you need a dedicated graphics card in a server? Usually you wouldn't even have a monitor connected.

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

#114

Post by sznio »

wink wrote: post #94

I really wonder who this is for? It's not competing with amd/nvidia at twice the price on terms of performance, but it's also too expensive for a cheap gaming rig. And then there are people who are happy with integrated graphics. Maybe I'm just lacking imagination here, I don't do anything fancy on my work and couch laptops and I have a proper gaming PC.

Accelerated AV1 encoding for a home server.

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

#115

Post by blagie »

colechristensen wrote: post #104
tester756 wrote: post #17

https://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…

#3 player just released something that compares well with price/performace ratio compared to #1 player's release from a year and a half ago... yep

Well, no. It doesn't. The comparison is to the A1000.

Toss in a 5060 Ti into the compare table, and we're in an entirely different playing field.

There are reasons to buy the workstation NVidia cards over the consumer ones, but those mostly go away when looking at something like the new Intel. Unless one is in an exceptionally power-constrained environment, yet has room for a full-sized card (not SFF or laptop), I can't see a time the B50 would even be in the running against a 5060 Ti, 4060 Ti, or even 3060 Ti.

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

#116

Post by KeplerBoy »

colechristensen wrote: post #104
tester756 wrote: post #17

https://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…

#3 player just released something that compares well with price/performace ratio compared to #1 player's release from a year and a half ago... yep

"release from a year and a half ago", that's technically true but a really generous assessment of the situation.

We could just as well compare it to the slightly more capable RTX A2000, which was released more than 4 years ago. Either way, Intel is competing with the EoL Ampere architecture.

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

#117

Post by ThatPlayer »

Aurornis wrote: post #21
bitmasher9 wrote: post #5

It’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 superior option for monitors. High end gaming monitors will have DisplayPort inputs. Converting from DisplayPort to HDMI is trivial with a cheap adapter if necessary. HDMI is mostly used on TVs and older monitors now.

I'd say that's a more recent development though because of how long it took for DisplayPort 2 products to make it to market. On both my RTX 4000 series GPU, and gaming 1440p240hz OLED monitor, HDMI 2.1 (~42 Gigabit) is the higher bandwidth port over its DisplayPort 1.4 (~26 Gigabit). So I use the HDMI ports. 26 Gigabit isn't enough for 1440p240z at 10-bit HDR colour. You can do it with DSC, but that comes with its own issues.

Only now are DisplayPort 2 monitors coming out

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

#118

Post by Solocle »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #14
dale_glass wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

See, the openness is one reason I'd lean towards Intel ARC. They literally provide programming manuals for Alchemist, which you could use to implement your own card driver. Far more complete and less whack than dealing with AMD's AtomBIOS.

As someone who has toyed with OS development, including a working NVMe driver, that's not to be underestimated. I mean, it's an absurd idea, graphics is insanely complex. But documentation makes it theoretically possible... a simple framebuffer and 2d acceleration for each screen might be genuinely doable.

https://www.x.org/docs/intel/ACM/

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

#119

Post by high_na_euv »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #22

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?

Wtf? Source on that?

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

#120

Post by blagie »

syntaxing wrote: post #39
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably better off with the incoming B60 which has 24GB vram.

There’s a 48GB B60 already [1] but it’s definitely a significant amount more than 3X B50 pro (you obviously get way better performance). [1] https://www.maxsun.com/products/intel-arc-pro-b60-dual-48g-t...

Four of these together should, in the abstract, let you run 200GB models, which is where things get very, very interesting.

The biggest Deepseek V2 models would just fit, as would some of the giant Meta open source models. Those have rather pleasant performance.

In theory, how feasible is that?

I feel like the software stack might be like a Jenga tower. And PCIe limitations might hit pretty hard.

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