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Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

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21–30 of 131 posts

Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

#21
post #11

Any business people here that can explain why companies announce products a year before their release? I can understand getting consumers excited but it also tells competitors what you are doing giving them time to make changes of their own. What's the advantage here?

In this case there is no risk of anyone stealing Intel's ideas or even reacting to them. First, they're not even an also-ran in the AI compute space. Nobody is looking to them for roadmap ideas. Intel does not have any credibility, and no customer is going to be going to Nvidia and demanding that they match Intel. Second, what exactly would the competitors react to? The only concrete technical detail is that the card…

Given how long it takes to develop a new GPU I’m pretty sure this one was signed off by Pat and given it survived Lip-Bu’s axe that says something, at least for Intel.

Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

#22

Any business people here that can explain why companies announce products a year before their release? I can understand getting consumers excited but it also tells competitors what you are doing giving them time to make changes of their own. What's the advantage here?

The AI bubble might not last another year. Better get a few more pumps in before it blows.

There is a serious possibility this isn’t a bubble. Too many people watched the big short and now call every bull a bubble; maybe the bubble was the dollar and it’s popping now instead.

Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

#23
post #16

I 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.

With this much ram don’t expect anything remotely affordable by civilians.

Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

#24
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI bubble might not last another year. Better get a few more pumps in before it blows.

AI is not going anywhere. Now everyone wants to get a piece. Local inference is expected to grow. Documents, image, video, etc processing. Another obvious is driverless farm vehicles and other automated equipment. "Assisted" books, images, news,.. already and grows fast. Translation also a fact.

The technology, maybe - and if on local.

The public co valuations of quickly depreciating chip hoarders selling expensive fever dreams to enterprises are gonna pop though.

Spend 3-7 USD for 20 cents in return and 95% project failures rates for quarters on end aren't gonna go unnoticed on Wall St.

Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

#25

I remember Larabee and Xeon-Phi announcements and getting so excited at the time. So I'll wait but curb my enthusiasm.

Yeah, Intel's problem is that this is (at least) the third time they've announced a new ML accelerator platform, and the first two got shitcanned. At this point I wouldn't even glance at an Intel product in this space until it had been on the market for at least five years and several iterations, to be somewhat sure it isn't going to be killed, and Intel's current leadership inspires no confidence that they'll wait that long for success.

Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

#26
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI bubble might not last another year. Better get a few more pumps in before it blows.

There is a serious possibility this isn’t a bubble. Too many people watched the big short and now call every bull a bubble; maybe the bubble was the dollar and it’s popping now instead.

Have you looked in detail at the economics of this?

Career finance professionals are calling it a bubble, not due to their suddenly found deep technological expertise, but because public cos like FAANG et. al are engaging in typical bubble like behavior: Shifting capex away from their balance sheets into SPACs co-financed by private equity.

This is not a consumer debt bubble, it's gonna be a private market bubble.

But as all bubbles go, someones gonna be left holding the bag with society covering for the fallout.

It'll be a rate hike, it'll be some Fortune X00 enterprises cutting their non-ROI-AI-bleed or it'll be an AI-fanboy like Oracle over-leveraging themselves and then watching their credit default swaps going "Boom!" leading to a financing cut off.

Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

#27
post #17

A not-absurdly-priced card that can run big models (even quantized) would sell like crazy. Lots and lots of fast RAM is key.

How does LPDDR5 (This Xe3P) compare with GDDR7 (Nvidia's flagships) when it comes to inference performance?

Local inference is an interesting proposition because today in real life, the NV H300 and AMD MI-300 clusters are operated by OpenAI and Anthropic in batching mode, which slows users down as they're forced to wait for enough similar sized queries to arrive. For local inference, no waiting is required - so you could get potentially higher throughput.

Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

#28

Any business people here that can explain why companies announce products a year before their release? I can understand getting consumers excited but it also tells competitors what you are doing giving them time to make changes of their own. What's the advantage here?

This is a shareholder “me too” product

What are they gonna do with their own FAB?

Not release anything?

There'll be a good market share for comparatively "lower power/ good enough" local AI. Check out Alez Ziskind's analysis of the B50 Pro [0]. Intel has an entire line-up of cheap GPUs that perform admirably for local use cases.

This guy is building a rack on B580s and the driver update alone has pushed his rig from 30 t/s to 90 t/s. [1]

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBbJy-jhsAA

1: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o1k5rc/new_int...

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