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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

#251

Post by bsder »

rdos wrote: post #217
vid wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no point in using a low-bandwidth card like the B50 for AI. Attempting to use 2x or 4x cards to load a real model will result in poor performance and low generation speed. If you don’t need a larger model, use a 3060 or 2x 3060, and you’ll get significantly better performance than the B50—so much better that the higher power consumption won’t matter (70W vs. 170W for a single card). Higher VRAM wont make the…

> There is no point in using a low-bandwidth card like the B50 for AI.

People actually use loaded out M-series macs for some forms of AI training. So, total memory does seem to matter in certain cases.

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

#252

Post by Rohansi »

pjmlp wrote: post #177
Rohansi wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PS5 has something like 16GB unified RAM, and no game is going to really push much beyond that in VRAM use That's pretty funny considering that PC games are moving more towards 32GB RAM and 8GB+ VRAM. The next generation of consoles will of course increase to make room for higher quality assets.

In many cases due to bad programming, fixed by adding more RAM.

Sure, but not always. Future games will have more detailed assets which will require more memory. Running at 4K or higher resolution will be more common which also requires more memory.

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

#253

Post by zamadatix »

derefr wrote: post #234
zamadatix wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing price to performance in this space might not make much sense as it would seem. One of the (very few) interesting qualities in the A1000 is that it's single slot, low profile, workstation GPU. Intel kept the "powered by the PCIe slot" aspect, but made it dual slot and full height. Needing a "workstation" GPU in a tiny form factor (i.e. not meant to slot and power full sized GPUs) was something one could sque…

I'm still waiting for one of Nvidia/AMD/Intel to realize that if they make an inference-focused Thunderbolt eGPU "appliance" (not just a PCIe card in an eGPU chassis, but a sealed, vertically-integrated board-in-box design), then that would completely free them from design constraints around size/shape/airflow in an ATX chassis. Such an appliance could plug into literally any modern computer — even a laptop or NUC. (…

The strength is the weakness here - if the appliance gets so little from plugging directly into the host system then requiring the appliance to plug in to the host system to work at all becomes more of a burden than a value.

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

#255

Post by tracker1 »

wqaatwt wrote: post #248
tracker1 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already got 2x the ram and roughly 1.5x the performance of the more expensive NVidia competitor... I'm not sure where you are getting your expectations from.

But that Nvidia competitor seems like a pointless and overpriced card compared to Nvidia’s consumer GPUs.

Sure.. but even going consumer, for 16gb+, you can get an ARC A770 for $80 less, or an RX 9060 XT for a few dollars more... Will it perform better, I don't know. RTX 5060 Ti 16gb is about $70 more.

Prices from NewEgg on 16gb+ consumer cards, sold by NewEgg and in stock.

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

#256

Post by AnthonyMouse »

prmoustache wrote: post #206
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia uses VRAM amount for market segmentation. They can't make a 128GB consumer card without cannibalizing their enterprise sales. Which means Intel or AMD making an affordable high-VRAM card is win-win. If Nvidia responds in kind, Nvidia loses a ton of revenue they'd otherwise have available to outspend their smaller competitors on R&D. If they don't, they keep more of those high-margin customers but now the ones…

> The increase in the amount people would be willing to pay for a card with more VRAM is unambiguously more than the increase in the manufacturing cost. I guess you already have the paper if it is that unambiguous. Would you mond sharing the data/source?

The cost of more pins is linear in the number of pins, and the pins aren't the only component of the manufacturing cost, so a card with twice as many pins will have a manufacturing cost of significantly less than twice that of a card with half as many pins.

Cards with 16GB of VRAM exist for ~$300 retail.

Cards with 80GB of VRAM cost >$15,000 and customers pay that.

A card with 80GB of VRAM could be sold for $15,000. QED.

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

#257

Post by AnthonyMouse »

singhrac wrote: post #132
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia uses VRAM amount for market segmentation. They can't make a 128GB consumer card without cannibalizing their enterprise sales. Which means Intel or AMD making an affordable high-VRAM card is win-win. If Nvidia responds in kind, Nvidia loses a ton of revenue they'd otherwise have available to outspend their smaller competitors on R&D. If they don't, they keep more of those high-margin customers but now the ones…

This is almost true but not quite - I don't think much of the (dollar) spend on enterprise GPUs (H100, B200, etc.) would transfer if there was a 128 GB consumer card. The problem is both memory bandwidth (HBM) and networking (NVLink), which NVIDIA definitely uses to segment consumer vs enterprise hardware. I think your argument is still true overall, though, since there are a lot of "gpu poors" (i.e. grad students) w…

NVLink matters if you want to combine a whole bunch of GPUs, e.g. you need more VRAM than any individual GPU is available with. Many workloads exist that don't care about that or don't have working sets that large, particularly if the individual GPU actually has a lot of VRAM. If you need 128GB and you have GPUs with 40GB of VRAM then you need a fast interconnect. If you can get an individual GPU with 128GB, you don't.

There is also work being done to make this even less relevant because people are already interested in e.g. using four 16GB cards without a fast interconnect when you have a 64GB model. The simpler implementation of this is to put a quarter of the model on each card split in the order it's used and then have the performance equivalent of one card with 64GB of VRAM by only doing work on the card with that section of the data in its VRAM and then moving the (much smaller) output to the next card. A more sophisticated implementation does something similar but exploits parallelism by e.g. running four batches at once, each offset by a quarter, so that all the cards stay busy. Not all workloads can be split like this but for some of the important ones it works.

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

#258

Post by fwipsy »

vid wrote: post #192
fwipsy wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

r/LocalLLaMA has 90,000 subscribers. r/PCMasterRace has 9,000,000. I'll bet there are a lot more casual PC gamers who don't talk about it online than there are casual local AI users, too.

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

#259

Post by mwpmaybe »

godman_8 wrote: post #67
Ardon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Say more?

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

#260

Post by mwpmaybe »

unsnap_biceps wrote: post #68
Ardon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have Linux (AMD RDNA2), Windows (NVIDIA Ada), and Mac (M3) systems hooked up to my L1T DP1.4 KVM[1] without any other gadgets and they all work fine. What problem(s) are you trying to solve/did you solve with the EDID cloner?

1. https://www.store.level1techs.com/products/p/14-display-port...

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