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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

#191

Post by izacus »

snowram wrote: post #131
bsder wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put 32GB on that card and everybody would ignore performance issues. With 16GB everybody will just call it another in the long list of Intel failures.

I wonder why everyone keep saying "just put more VRAM" yet no cards seem to do that. If it is that easy to compete with Nvidia, why don't we already have those cards?

Because:

- less people care about VRAM than HN commenters give impression of

- VRAM is expensive and wouldn't make such cards profitable at the HN desired price points

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

#192

Post by vid »

fwipsy wrote: post #187
snowram wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why everyone keep saying "just put more VRAM" yet no cards seem to do that. If it is that easy to compete with Nvidia, why don't we already have those cards?

Maybe because only AI enthusiasts want that much VRAM, and most of them will pony up for a higher-end GPU anyways? Everyone is suggesting it here because that's what they want, but I don't know if this crowd is really representative of broader market sentiment.

There are a lot of local AI hobbyists, just visit /r/LocalLLama to see how many are using 8GB cards, or all the people asking for higher RAM version of cards.

This makes it mysterious since clearly CUDA is an advantage, but higher VRAM lower cost cards with decent open library support would be compelling.

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

#193

Post by anikom15 »

mrinterweb wrote: post #19
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 interface most gaming monitors use. If you don't need ARC or CEC, mostly used for home theater builds, DisplayPort is preferable.

Video cards with HDMI don’t support CEC anyway. eARC is only relevant for TV to AVR connexions.

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

#194

Post by 3036e4 »

anthk wrote: post #166
pjmlp wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that started on 8 bit computing, Tim Sweeny is right the Electron garbage culture when applied to Unreal 5 is one of the reasons so much RAM is needed, with such bad performance. While I dislike some of the handmade hero culture, in one thing they are right, regarding how bad modern hardware happens to be used.

I remember UE1 being playable even software mode, such as the first Deus EX. Now, I think the Surreal Engine (UE1 reimplementation) needs damn GL 3.3 (if not 4.5 and Vulkan) to play games I used to play in an Athlon. Now I can't use surreal to Play DX on my legacy n270 netbook with GL 2.1... something that was more than enough to play the game at 800x600 with everything turned on and much more. A good thing is that I…

Vanilla CDDA has a lot of entertaining endings, proper or not. I tend to find one within the first one or two in-game days. Great game! I like to install it now and then just to marvel at all the new things that have been added and then be killed by not knowing what I am doing.

Never got far enough to interact with most systems in the game or worry about proper endings.

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

#196

Post by altcognito »

solardev wrote: post #190
altcognito wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel is doing poorly, but I believe Apple was in much, much worse shape than this in the early 2000's. AMD was also in much, much worse shape that this. Intel has many, many solid customers at the government, enterprise and consumer levels. They will be around.

Wasn't that before the era of hyperscalers? Intel offers nothing of value anymore. What's to stop one for the giants from just swallowing them up like 3dfx or ATI?

They sell a lot to the hyperscalers as well, suggesting they offer something of value. I don't think anything prevents them from being swallowed up, but I'm not sure of what value that would be to a hyperscaler unless they want to get into the chip making business.

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

#197

Post by apwell23 »

colechristensen wrote: post #188
tinco wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The A1000 was well over $500 last year. This is the #3 player coming out with a card that's a better deal than what the #1 player currently has to offer. I don't get why there's people trying to twist this story or come up with strawmen like the A2000 or even the RTX5000 series. Intel's coming into this market competitively, which as far as I know is a first, and it's also impressive. Coming into the gaming GPU m…

NVIDIA is looking for profit, Intel is looking for market share, the pricing reflects this. Of course your product looks favorable to something released April 2024 when you're cutting pricing to get more attention.

helps to be funded by govt that doesn't care about profits

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

#198

Post by paool »

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.

Maybe today, but the more accessible and affordable they become, the more likely people can start offering "self hosted" options.

We're already seeing competitors of AWS but only targeting things like Qwen , deepseek, etc.

There's Enterprise customers who have compliance laws and literally want AI but cannot use any of the top models because everything has to be run on their own infrastructure.

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

#199

Post by rtrgrd »

williamdclt wrote: post #162
GTP wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Especially because VRAM suppliers might worry about ramping up production too much and then being left with an oversupply situation. Given the high demand of graphic cards, is this a plausible scenario?

I don't really know what I'm talking about (whether about graphic cards or in AI inference), but if someone figures out how to cut the compute needed for AI inference significantly then I'd guess the demand for graphic cards would suddenly drop? Given how young and volatile this domain still is, it doesn't seem unreasonable to be wary of it. Big players (google, openai and the likes) are probably pouring tons of mone…

I would suspect that for self hosted LLMs, quality >>> performance, so the newer releases will always expand to fill capacity of available hardware even when efficiency is improved.

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

#200

Post by qudat »

snowram wrote: post #131
bsder wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put 32GB on that card and everybody would ignore performance issues. With 16GB everybody will just call it another in the long list of Intel failures.

I wonder why everyone keep saying "just put more VRAM" yet no cards seem to do that. If it is that easy to compete with Nvidia, why don't we already have those cards?

I'm willing to bet there are technical limitations to just "adding more VRAM" to all these boards.
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