Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support

phoronix.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 722 posts

Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support

#181

Post by adriancr »

vlovich123 wrote: post #167
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't people been saying that for the last decade? I mean, eventually they will be right, maybe "about" means next year, or maybe a decade later? They just have to stop making huge improvements for a few years and the investment will dry up. I really wasn't interested in computer hardware anymore (they are fast enough!) until I discovered the world of running LLMs and other AI locally. Now I actually care about com…

What makes local AI interesting to you vs larger remote models like ChatGPT and Claude?

Not OP but for me a big thing is privacy, I can feed it personal documents and expect those to not leak.

It has zero cost, hardware is already there. I'm not captive to some remote company.

I can fiddle and integrate with other home sensors / automation as I want.

Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support

#182

Post by epicureanideal »

vlovich123 wrote: post #167
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't people been saying that for the last decade? I mean, eventually they will be right, maybe "about" means next year, or maybe a decade later? They just have to stop making huge improvements for a few years and the investment will dry up. I really wasn't interested in computer hardware anymore (they are fast enough!) until I discovered the world of running LLMs and other AI locally. Now I actually care about com…

What makes local AI interesting to you vs larger remote models like ChatGPT and Claude?

Lack of ideological capture of the public models.

Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support

#183

Post by ksd482 »

stracer wrote: post #104

Too late, and it has a bad rep. This effort from Intel to sell discrete GPUs is just inertia from old aspirations, won't really help noticeably to save it, as there is not much money in it. Most probably the whole Intel ARC effort will be mothballed, and probably many more will.

What's the alternative?

I think it's the right call since there isn't much competition in GPU industry anyway. Sure, Intel is far behind. But they need to start somewhere in order to break ground.

Strictly speaking strategically, my intuition is that they will learn from this, course correct and then would start making progress.

Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support

#184

Post by kimixa »

PittleyDunkin wrote: post #156
dgfitz wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ML is about hit another winter. Maybe intel is ahead of industry. Or we can keep asking high computers questions about programming.

> ML is about hit another winter. I agree ML is about to hit (or has likely already hit) some serious constraints compared to breathless predictions of two years ago. I don't think there's anything equivalent to the AI winter on the horizon, though—LLMs even operated by people who have no clue how the underlying mechanism functions are still far more empowered than anything like the primitives of the 80s enabled.

I think there'll be a "financial" winter - or another way a bubble burst - the investment right now is simply unsustainable, how are these products going to be monetized?

Nvidia had a revenue of $27billion in 2023 - that's about $160 per person per year [0] for every working age person in the USA. And it's predicted to more than double in 2024. If you reduce that to office workers (you know, the people who might actually get some benefit, as no AI is going to milk a cow or serve you starbucks) that's more like $1450/year. Or again more than double that for 2024.

How much value add is the current set of AI products going to give us? It's still mostly promise too.

Sure, like most bubbles there'll probably still be some winners, but there's no way the current market as a whole is sustainable.

The only way the "maximal AI" dream income is actually going to happen is if they functionally replace a significant proportion of the working population completely. And that probably would have large enough impacts to society that things like "Dollars In A Bank" or similar may not be so important.

[0] Using the stat of "169.8 million people worked at some point in 2022" https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/work.pdf

[1] 18.5 million office workers according to https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.nr0.htm

Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support

#185

Post by wing-_-nuts »

philistine wrote: post #158
giobox wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure its been a sweet spot for a very long time for budget conscious gamers looking for best balance of price and frame rates, but 1440p optimized parts are nothing new. Both NVidia and AMD make parts that target 1440p display users too, and have done for years. Even previous Intel parts you can argue were tailored for 1080p/1440p use, given their comparative performance deficit at 4k etc. Assuming they retail at…

I'm baffled that PC gamers have decided that 1440p is the endgame for graphics. When I look at a 27-inch 1440p display, I see pixel edges everywhere. It's right at the edge of losing the visibility of individual pixels, since I can't perceive them at 27-inch 2160p, but not quite there yet for desktop distances. Time marches on, and I become ever more separated from gaming PC enthusiasts.

I used to be in the '4k or bust' camp, but then I realized that I needed 1.5x scaling on a 27" display to have my UI at a comfy size. That put me right back at 1440p screen real estate and you had to deal with fractional scaling issues.

Instead, I bought a good 27" 1440p monitor, and you know what? I am not the discerning connoisseur of pixels that I thought I was. Honestly, it's fine.

I will hold out with this setup until I can get a 8k 144hz monitor and a gpu to drive it for a reasonable price. I expect that will take another decade or so.

Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support

#186

Post by layer8 »

philistine wrote: post #158
giobox wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure its been a sweet spot for a very long time for budget conscious gamers looking for best balance of price and frame rates, but 1440p optimized parts are nothing new. Both NVidia and AMD make parts that target 1440p display users too, and have done for years. Even previous Intel parts you can argue were tailored for 1080p/1440p use, given their comparative performance deficit at 4k etc. Assuming they retail at…

I'm baffled that PC gamers have decided that 1440p is the endgame for graphics. When I look at a 27-inch 1440p display, I see pixel edges everywhere. It's right at the edge of losing the visibility of individual pixels, since I can't perceive them at 27-inch 2160p, but not quite there yet for desktop distances. Time marches on, and I become ever more separated from gaming PC enthusiasts.

This is a trade-off with frame rates and rendering quality. When having to choose, most gamers prefer higher frame rate and rendering quality. With 4K, that becomes very expensive, if not impossible. 4K is 2.25 times the pixels of 1440p, which for example means you can get double the frame rate with 1440p using the same processing power and bandwidth.

In other words, the current tech just isn’t quite there yet, or not cheap enough.

Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support

#187

Post by justsomehnguy »

jmward01 wrote: post #179
hajile wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Launching a new SKU for $500-1000 with 48gb of RAM seems like a profitable idea. The GPU isn't top-of-the-line, but the RAM would be unmatched for running a lot of models locally.

give me 48gb with reasonable power consumption so I can dev locally and I will buy it in a heartbeat. Anyone that is fine-tuning would want a setup like that to test things before pushing to real GPUs. And in reality if you can fine-tune on a card like that in two days instead of a few hours it would totally be worth it.

I would love too, but you can't just add the chips, you need the the bus too.

Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support

#188

Post by ben_w »

PittleyDunkin wrote: post #156
dgfitz wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ML is about hit another winter. Maybe intel is ahead of industry. Or we can keep asking high computers questions about programming.

> ML is about hit another winter. I agree ML is about to hit (or has likely already hit) some serious constraints compared to breathless predictions of two years ago. I don't think there's anything equivalent to the AI winter on the horizon, though—LLMs even operated by people who have no clue how the underlying mechanism functions are still far more empowered than anything like the primitives of the 80s enabled.

What we had in the 80s was barely able to perform spell-check, free downloadable LLMs today are mind-blowing even in comparison to GPT-2.

Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support

#189

Post by ggregoire »

jmward01 wrote: post #103

12GB max is a non-starter for ML work now. Why not come out with a reasonably priced 24gb card even if it isn't the fastest and target it at the ML dev world? Am I missing something here?

> 12GB max is a non-starter for ML work now.

Can you even do ML work with a GPU not compatible with CUDA? (genuine question)

A quick search showed me the equivalence to CUDA in the Intel world is oneAPI, but in practice, are the major Python libraries used for ML compatible with oneAPI? (Was also gonna ask if oneAPI can run inside Docker but apparently it does [1])

[1] https://hub.docker.com/r/intel/oneapi

Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support

#190

Post by treprinum »

dimensi0nal wrote: post #172
bongodongobob wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know a single person in real life that has any desire to run local LLMs. Even amongst my colleagues and tech friends, not very many use LLMs period. It's still very niche outside AI enthusiasts. GPT is better than anything I can run locally anyway. It's not as popular as you think it is.

The only consumer demand for local AI models is for generating pornography

How about running your intelligent home with a voice assistant on your own computer? In privacy-oriented countries (Germany) that would be massive.
Post reply on HN