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Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

pugetsystems.com

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Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#11

Post by bigyabai »

speedgoose wrote: post #7

Time to first token is a very important performance metric, as I figured out using a Mac Studio M3 Ultra (that is quite slow on this aspect). But 32GB for a TDP of 230W is perhaps not super interesting. Especially because you probably want to have more than one card. It's a lot of heat. You could use the cards for heating up a building, but heatpumps exist.

A lot of the TDP is reserved for running the shader units at full-power. My RTX 3070 Ti only pulls ~110w of it's 320w running CUDA inference on Gemma 26b and E4B.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#12

Post by dismalaf »

MostlyStable wrote: post #6

Is Intel still making GPUs? I have heard so many conflicting things about will they/won't they stay in the market.

They'll always have iGPUs so whether or not they stay in the dGPU market depends mostly on whether or not people buy them. So they might not, whole market seems to be moving to SoCs/APUs/whatever you want to call them.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#13

Post by 999900000999 »

driverdan wrote: post #10

From what I've read the Intel drivers are terrible and holding back using them for LLMs.

Everyone has terrible drivers here aside from Nvidia.

Intel looks like they'll leave the dedicated GPU space, so it's a bit doubtful if the drivers will ever catch up.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#14

Post by martinald »

driverdan wrote: post #10

From what I've read the Intel drivers are terrible and holding back using them for LLMs.

Don't think that's true. The drivers are bad (not sure terrible is fair, they have improved a lot) esp for older directx etc games. But Vulkan support is pretty good and that's all you need for LLMs really.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#15

Post by Scaevolus »

bigyabai wrote: post #11
speedgoose wrote: post #7

Time to first token is a very important performance metric, as I figured out using a Mac Studio M3 Ultra (that is quite slow on this aspect). But 32GB for a TDP of 230W is perhaps not super interesting. Especially because you probably want to have more than one card. It's a lot of heat. You could use the cards for heating up a building, but heatpumps exist.

A lot of the TDP is reserved for running the shader units at full-power. My RTX 3070 Ti only pulls ~110w of it's 320w running CUDA inference on Gemma 26b and E4B.

It's not that it's reserving power, but rather that you hit some bottleneck on a 3070 Ti before running into thermal limits-- it's likely limited by either tensor core saturation or RAM throughput. Running the workload with Nvidia's profiling tools should make the bottleneck obvious.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#17

Post by XCSme »

ZiiS wrote: post #9
XCSme wrote: post #5

Can you use those AI cards for gaming too? Or the makers intentionally nerf them, in order to better segment the markets/product lines?

The drivers often need per game optimisations these will be missing but I doubt Intel would nerf them, just rely on you not paying a lot for RAM the game won't use.

I actually meant it in a different way. I would get it for local AI stuff, but being able to game on it would be a huge plus, otherwise I would need two different machines.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#18

Post by zargon »

SparkyMcUnicorn wrote: post #8

Here are some llama.cpp benchmarks for it: https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-pro-b70-linux/3

Also from phoronix, a comparison with AMD R9700 and RTX 6000 Ada (because Nvidia has not sent them a blackwell card): https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-pro-b70/2

Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#19

Post by wmf »

XCSme wrote: post #5

Can you use those AI cards for gaming too? Or the makers intentionally nerf them, in order to better segment the markets/product lines?

They nerf gaming cards to make money on the pro cards. Since this is a pro card it's not nerfed.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#20

Post by numpad0 »

MostlyStable wrote: post #6

Is Intel still making GPUs? I have heard so many conflicting things about will they/won't they stay in the market.

Intel always had that habit of starting an internal conflict whenever whatever potential alternative revenue sources start to threaten their internal dependence on x86
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