Anybody knows memory bandwidth?
Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM
111–120 of 131 posts
Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM
#112Honestly, Intel just has to build a GPU with insane amount of VRAM. It doesn't even have to be the fastest to compete... just a ton of vram for dirt cheap
It’s LPDDR5x It’s gonna be slowwww It’s gonna be what, 273GB/sec vram bandwidth at most? Might as well as buy an AND 395+ 128GB right now for the same inference performance and slightly less VRAM.
Bandwidth depends very much on on bus width.
If its fast LPDDR5x (9600 MT/s) with 512 bit bus width (8 64bit channels (actually multiples of quad 16 bit subchannel nonsense)) it could be upwards of 600 GB/s. Lots of bandwidth like the beefy macs have.
Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
And even then, you couldn't really get any sort of serious matmul out of it; they were per-vertex, not per-pixel. Per-pixel matmul (which is what you really need for anything resembling GPGPU) came with Shader Model 2.0, circa 2002; Radeon 9700, the GeForce FX series and the likes. CUDA didn't exist (nor really any other form of compute shaders), but you could wrangle it with pixel shaders, and some of us did.
Oh man, I forgot about doing vector math using OpenGL textures as "hardware acceleration". And it would be many more years before it was reasonable to require a GPU with programmable shaders; having to support fixed-function was a fact of life for most of the 2000's.
There were actually some completely insane workarounds even before shaders. I don't think it was actually shipped in real software, but I saw something that used 11 or 18 passes or something to do dot3 texture blending even on unextended OpenGL 1.0. Painstakingly doing one color channel at a time, values above 0 and below 0 on source and destination also separately…
Granted, if you didn't have the “squared blend” extension, it would be an approximation, but still a pretty convincing one.
Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
With 160GB, surely they can add more channels to compensate?
Is there anything preventing them from using heterogeneous memory chips, like 1/4 GDDR7 and 3/4 LPDDR? It could enable new MEO-like architectures with finer-grained performance tuning for long contexts.
You'd have to burn more die space for the duplicate but different ram controller logic and cache trees, I bet.
If the internal bus architecture is anything similar to QPI, getting the 'different' parts to communicate reliably is probably also a pain.
Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM
#115It would be great if they would greatly undercut the price of the NVIDIA DGX Spark.
Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM
#116I have no idea of the likely price, but (IMO) this is the sort of disruption that Intel needs to aim at if it's going to make some sort of dent in this market. If they could release this for around the price of a 5090, it would be very interesting.
> If they could release this for around the price of a 5090 This is not targeted at consumers. It’s competing with nVidia’s high RAM workstation cards. Think $10K price range, not $1-2K. The 160GB of LPDDR5X chips alone is expensive enough that they couldn’t release this at the $2K price point unless they felt like giving it away (which they don’t)
It's probably spark dgx competition. So around 3-5k would be ideally it.
Any higher and its not really a disruption
Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM
#117Honestly, Intel just has to build a GPU with insane amount of VRAM. It doesn't even have to be the fastest to compete... just a ton of vram for dirt cheap
It’s LPDDR5x It’s gonna be slowwww It’s gonna be what, 273GB/sec vram bandwidth at most? Might as well as buy an AND 395+ 128GB right now for the same inference performance and slightly less VRAM.
Slow is better than unavailable
Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
So far there is no 'plateau' in the nearest future. 'AI' as a science and its applications should develop further for the next several years. Models will get more efficient, but still the bigger the better. This is obvious. Even if models don't scale up well, they can be used collectively in parallel 'brainstorming'. This will still create demand for hardware. Stagnation is still possible in case of recession. In thi…
Your entire argument is whoefully ignoring the CapEx economics of all of this. But that's the foundation. And there is a plateau in real money spent on AI chips. You're ignoring a whole group of economic and finance professionals as well as - if you're inclined to listen to their voices more - Sama calling it a bubble. If not for AI spending, the US already would be in a recession. So your argument might sound nice a…
The basics here is return for investments. If it's all just a bubble it will pop. We'll see soon. For now it doesn't look like, to me. And that creates a lot of complexity on top of 'digital divide' we already have.
Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
160 GB LPDDR5 is ~$1,200 retail so the card could be sold for $2,000. The price will depend on how desperate Intel is. Intel probably can't copy Nvidia's pricing.
It’d be a disaster for Intel if it sold for less than 3k, personally I think they’re aiming for break even at 5k a pop at least, and I wouldn’t be surprised to advertise 2x memory at half nvidia price, which would put it at ~15-20k? and a healthy margin which they need like oxygen now. Of course it’s all for naught if it doesn’t perform compute-wise.
4x 5090s gets you way faster inference than I suspect this will, or the 6000 pro if you needed datacentre format at expense of raw speed.
Given either of those setups is ~8k this will have to come in for less than that.
Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM
#120What price is this sitting at? Because if its software support is decent then Intel might have just managed to break into the hardware for AI on the edge. Examples like self hosted LLM finetuning and RAG on a old dell or HP server with these type of cards on them.
> Examples like self hosted LLM finetuning and RAG on an old dell or HP server with these type of cards on them. This won’t be in the price range of an old Dell server or a fun impulse buy for a hobbyist. 160GB of raw LPDDR5X chips alone is not cheap. This is a server/workstation grade card and the price is going where the market will allow. Consider that an nVidia card with almost half the RAM is going to cost $8K o…
Maybe not old but if this was say a 6k card that would make it accessible to pretty much any business and at least some hobbyists. 160GB of Lpddr5 should be less than 2k, so it's easily doable if they've got the will. 4 x 5090s is 128GB and probs much more powerful at ~8k, so it would need to be 6/7k to make it make sense.