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

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

#251

Post by SmellTheGlove »

Numerlor wrote: post #65
jsheard wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The IO requires a lot of die space. And even if you spend a lot of die space on memory controllers, you can only fit so many GDDR chips around the GPU core while maintaining signal integrity. HBM sidesteps that issue but it's still too expensive for anything but the highest end accelerators, and the ordinary LPDDR that Apple uses is lacking in bandwidth compared to GDDR, so they have to compensate with ginormous am…

Going off of how the 4090 and 7900 xtx is arranged I think you could maybe fit on or two chips more around the die over their 12, but that's still a far cry from 128. That would probably just need a shared bus like normal DDR as you're not fitting that much with 16 gbit density

What if we did what others suggested was the practical limit - 48GB. Then just put 2-3 cards in the system and maybe had a little bridge over a separate bus for them to communicate?

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

#252

Post by Der_Einzige »

Wytwwww wrote: post #74
Muskyinhere wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if they could just do that and it would rival what NVidia has, they would just do it. But obvoiusly they don't. And for reasons: NVidia has worked on CUDA for ages, do you believe they just replace this whole thing in no time?

Does CUDA even matter than much for LLMs? Especially inference? I don't think software would be the limiting factor for this hypothetical GPU. Afterall it would be competing with Apple's M chips not with the 4090 or Nvidia's enterprise GPUs.

It's the only thing that matters. Folks act like AMD support is there because suddenly you can run the most basic LLM workload. Try doing anything actually interesting (i.e, try running anything cool in the mechanistic interoperability or representation/attention engineer world) with AMD and suddenly everything broken, nothing works, and you have to spend millions worth of AI engineer developer time to try to salvage a working solution.

Or you can just buy Nvidia.

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

#253

Post by Der_Einzige »

treprinum wrote: post #72
pjmlp wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fraction of CUDA capabilities.

Sufficient for LLMs and image/video gen.

Not even close. Llama.cpp isn't even close to a production ready LLM inference engine, and it runs overwhelmingly faster when using CUDA

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

#254

Post by 1propionyl »

jvanderbot wrote: post #205
1propionyl wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> upscaling is absolutely vital for a reasonable experience on some games This strikes me as a bit of a sad state of affairs. We've moved beyond a Parkinson's law of computational resources –usage by games expands to fill the available resources– to resource usage expanding to fill the available resources on the highest end machines unavailable for less than a few thousand dollars... and then using that to train a mo…

Isn't it insane to think that rendering triangles for the visuals in games has gotten so demanding that we need an artificially intelligent system embedded in our graphics cards to paint pixels that look like high definition geometry? What a time to be alive. Our most advanced technology is used to cheat on homework and play video games.

It is. And it strikes me as evidence we've lost the plot and a measure has ceased to be a good measure upon being a target.

It used to be that more computational power was desirable because it would allow for developers to more fully realize creative visions that weren't previously possible.

Now, it seems that the goal is simply visual fidelity and asset complexity... and the rest of the experience is not only secondary, but compromised in pursuit of the former.

Thinking back on recent games that felt like something new and painstakingly crafted... they're almost all 2D (or look like it), lean on excellent art/music (and even haptics!) direction, have a well-crafted core gameplay loop or set of systems, and have relatively low actual system requirements (which in turn means they are exceptionally smooth without any AI tricks).

Off the top of my head few years: Hades, Balatro, Animal Well, Cruelty Squad[0], Spelunky, Pizza Tower, Papers Please, etc. Most of these could just as easily have been made a decade ago.

That's not to say we haven't had many games that are gorgeous and fun. But while the latter is necessary and sufficient, the former is neither.

It's just icing: it doesn't matter if the cake tastes like crap.

[0] a mission statement if there ever was one for how much fun something can be while not just being ugly but being actively antagonistic to the senses and any notion of good taste.

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

#255

Post by declan_roberts »

layer8 wrote: post #113
icegreentea2 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2k usually refers to 1080p no? The k is the approximate horizontal resolution, so 1920x1080 is definitely 2k enough.

Actual use is inconsistent. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2K_resolution : “ In consumer products, 2560 × 1440 (1440p) is sometimes referred to as 2K, but it and similar formats are more traditionally categorized as 2.5K resolutions. ” “2K” is used to denote WQHD often enough, whereas 1080p is usually called that, if not “FHD”. “2K” being used to denote resolutions lower than WQHD is really only a thing for the 2…

TIL

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

#256

Post by Palomides »

tremon wrote: post #29
jeffbee wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the newest platform that lacks resizable BAR? It was standardized in 2006. Is 4060-level graphics performance useful in whatever old computer has that problem?

The newest platform is probably POWER10. ReBar is not supported on any POWER platform, most likely including the upcoming POWER11. Also, I don't think you'll find many mainboards from 2006 supporting it. It may have been standardized in 2006, but a quick online search leads me to think that even on x86 mainboards it didn't become commonly available until at least 2020.

do you have a reference for power rebar support? just curious, I couldn't find anything with a quick look

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

#257

Post by p1esk »

treprinum wrote: post #208
elorant wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD has a 192GB GPU. I don’t see them eating NVidia’s lunch with it.

They are charging as much as Nvidia for it. Now imagine they offered such a card for $2k. Would that allow them to eat Nvidia's lunch?

We would also need to imagine AMD fixing their software.

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

#258

Post by jamesgeck0 »

crowcroft wrote: post #127

Anyone using Intel graphics cards? Aside from specs drivers and support can make or break the value prop of a gfx card. Would be curious what actually using is these is like.

I use an A770 LE for PC gaming. Windows drivers have improved substantially in the last two years. There's a driver update every month or so, although the Intel Arc control GUI hasn't improved in a while. Popular newer titles have generally run well; I've played some Metaphor, Final Fantasy 16, Elden Ring, Spider-Man Remastered, Horizon Zero Dawn, Overwatch, Jedi Survivor, Forza Horizon 4, Monster Hunter Sunbreak, etc. without major issues. Older games sometimes struggle; a 6 year old Need for Speed doesn't display terrain, some 10+ year old indie games crash. Usually fixed by dropping dxvk.dll in the game directory. This fix cannot be used with older Windows Store games. One problematic newer title was Starfield, which at launch had massive frame pacing and hard crashing issues exclusive to Intel Arc.

I've had a small sound latency issue forever; most visible with YouTube videos, the first half-second of every video is silent.

I picked this card up for about $120 less than the GTX 4060. Wasn't a terrible decision.

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

#259

Post by dgfitz »

hentrep wrote: post #194
adriancr wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Curious as I’m of the same mind - what’s your local AI setup? I’m looking to implement a local system that would ideally accommodate voice chat. I know the answer depends on my use case - mostly searching and analysis of personal documents - but would love to hear how you’ve implemented.

llama.ccp and time seems to be the general answer to this question.

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

#260

Post by ksec »

treprinum wrote: post #162
wtallis wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking for a GPU die at least as large as NVIDIA's TU102 that was $1k in 2018 when paired with only 11GB of RAM (because $1k couldn't get you a fully-enabled die to use 12GB of RAM). I think you're off by at least a factor of two in your cost estimates.

Intel has Xeon Phi which was a spin-off of their first attempt at GPU so they have a lot of tech in place they can reuse already. They don't need to go with GDDRx/HBMx designs that require large dies.

I don't want to further this discussions but may be you dont realise some of the people who replied to you either design hardware for a living or has been in the hardware industry for longer than 20 years.
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