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

261–270 of 722 posts

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

#261

Post by screye »

Havoc wrote: post #211

Who is the target audience for this? Well informed gamers know Intel's discrete GPU is hanging by a thread, so they're not hoping on that bandwagon. Too small for ML. The only people really happy seem to be the ones buying it for transcoding and I can't imagine there is a huge market of people going "I need to go buy a card for AV1 encoding".

all-in-1 machines.

Intel's customers are 3rd party Cpu assemblers like Dell & HP. Many corporate bulk buyers only care if 1-2 of the apps they use are supported. The lack of wider support isn't a concern.

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

#262

Post by p1esk »

jsheard wrote: post #248
p1esk wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple could do it. Why can’t Intel?

Because Apple isn't playing the same game as everyone else. They have the money and clout to buy out TSMCs bleeding-edge processes and leave everyone else with the scraps, and their silicon is only sold in machines with extremely fat margins that can easily absorb the BOM cost of making huge chips on the most expensive processes money can buy.

Bleeding edge processes is what Intel specializes in. Unlike Apple, they don’t need TSMC. This should have been a huge advantage for Intel. Maybe that’s why Gelsinger got the boot.

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

#263

Post by marcyb5st »

m00x wrote: post #136
Implicated wrote: post #101

12GB memory -.- I feel like _anyone_ who can pump out GPU's with 24GB+ of memory that are capable to use for py-stuff would benefit greatly. Even if it's not as performant as the NVIDIA options - just to be able to get the models to run, at whatever speed. They would fly off the shelves.

You can just use a CPU in that case, no? You can run most ML inference on vectorized operations on modern CPUs at a fraction of the price.

My 7800x says not really. Compared to my 3070 it feels so incredibly slow that gets in the way of productivity.

Specifically, waiting ~2 seconds vs ~20 for a code snippet is much more detrimental to my productivity than the time difference would suggest. In ~2 seconds I don't get distracted, in ~20 seconds my mind starts wandering and then I have to spend time refocusing.

Make a GPU that is 50% slower than a 2 generations older mid-range GPU (in tokens/s) but on bigger models and I would gladly shell out 1000+$.

So much so that I am considering getting a 5090 if nVdia actually fixes the connector mess they made with 4090s or even a used v100.

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

#264

Post by bayindirh »

treprinum wrote: post #26

Why don't they just release a basic GPU with 128GB RAM and eat NVidia's local generative AI lunch? The networking effect of all devs porting their LLMs etc. to that card would instantly put them as a major CUDA threat. But beancounters running the company would never get such an idea...

Disclosure: HPC admin who works with NIVIDA cards here.

Because, no. It's not as simple as that.

NVIDIA has a complete ecosystem now. They have cards. They have cards of cards (platforms), which they produce, validate and sell. They have NVLink crossbars and switches which connects these cards on their card of cards with very high speeds and low latency.

For inter-server communication they have libraries which coordinate cards, workloads and computations.

They bought Mellanox, but that can be used by anyone, so there's no lock-in for now.

As a tangent, NVIDIA has a whole set of standards for pumping tremendous amount of data in and out of these mesh of cards. Let it be GPU-Direct storage or specialized daemons which handle data transfers on and off cards.

If you think that you can connect n cards on PCIe bus and just send workloads to them and solve problems magically, you'll hurt yourself a lot, both performance and psychology wise.

You have to build a stack which can perform these things with maximum possible performance to be able to compute with NVIDIA. It's not just emulating CUDA, now. Esp., on the high end of the AI spectrum (GenAI, MultiCard, MultiSystem, etc.).

For other lower end, multi-tenant scenarios, they have card virtualization, MIG, etc. for card sharing. You have to complete on that, too, for cloud and smaller applications.

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

#265

Post by pixelpoet »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #233
jsheard wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M4 Max needs an enormous 512bit memory bus to extract enough bandwidth out of those LPDDR5x chips, while the GPUs that Intel just launched are 192/160bit and even flagships rarely exceed 384bit. They can't just slap more memory on the board, they would need to dedicate significantly more silicon area to memory IO and drive up the cost of the part, assuming their architecture would even scale that wide without hit…

It doesn't matter if the "cost is driven up". Nvidia has proven that we're all lil pay pigs for them. 5090 will be 3000$ for 32gb of VRAM. Screenshot this now, it will age well. We'd be happy to pay 5000 for 128gb from Intel.

You are absolutely correct, and even my non-prophetic ass echoed exactly the first sentence of the top comment in this HN thread ("Why don't they just release a basic GPU with 128GB RAM and eat NVidia's local generative AI lunch?").

Yes, yes, it's not trivial to have a GPU with 128gb of memory with cache tags and so on, but is that really in the same universe of complexity of taking on Nvidia and their CUDA / AI moat any other way? Did Intel ever give the impression they don't know how to design a cache? There really has to be a GOOD reason for this, otherwise everyone involved with this launch is just plain stupid or getting paid off to not pursue this.

Saying all this with infinite love and 100% commercial support of OpenCL since version 1.0, a great enjoyer of A770 with 16GB of memory, I live to laugh in the face of people who claimed for over 10 years that OpenCL is deprecated on MacOS (which I cannot stand and will never use, yet the hardware it runs on...) and still routinely crushes powerful desktop GPUs, in reality and practice today.

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

#266

Post by jamesgeck0 »

bloodyplonker22 wrote: post #176

I wanted Intel to do well so I purchased an ARC card. The problem is not the hardware. For some games, it worked fine, but in others, it kept crashing left and right. After updates to drivers, crashing was reduced, but it still happened. Driver software is not easy to develop thoroughly. Even AMD had problems when compared to Nvidia when AMD really started to enter the GPU game after buying ATI. AMD has long since so…

I haven't experienced many crashing issues on Windows 11. What games are you seeing this in?

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

#267

Post by mirekrusin »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #233
jsheard wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M4 Max needs an enormous 512bit memory bus to extract enough bandwidth out of those LPDDR5x chips, while the GPUs that Intel just launched are 192/160bit and even flagships rarely exceed 384bit. They can't just slap more memory on the board, they would need to dedicate significantly more silicon area to memory IO and drive up the cost of the part, assuming their architecture would even scale that wide without hit…

It doesn't matter if the "cost is driven up". Nvidia has proven that we're all lil pay pigs for them. 5090 will be 3000$ for 32gb of VRAM. Screenshot this now, it will age well. We'd be happy to pay 5000 for 128gb from Intel.

Me too, probably 2x. I’d sell like hot cakes.

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

#268

Post by jsheard »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #233
jsheard wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M4 Max needs an enormous 512bit memory bus to extract enough bandwidth out of those LPDDR5x chips, while the GPUs that Intel just launched are 192/160bit and even flagships rarely exceed 384bit. They can't just slap more memory on the board, they would need to dedicate significantly more silicon area to memory IO and drive up the cost of the part, assuming their architecture would even scale that wide without hit…

It doesn't matter if the "cost is driven up". Nvidia has proven that we're all lil pay pigs for them. 5090 will be 3000$ for 32gb of VRAM. Screenshot this now, it will age well. We'd be happy to pay 5000 for 128gb from Intel.

The question is whether there's enough overall demand for a GPU architecture with 4x the VRAM of a 5090 but only about 1/3rd of the bandwidth. At that point it would only really be good for AI inferencing, so why not make specialized inferencing silicon instead?

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

#269

Post by AlotOfReading »

p1esk wrote: post #262
jsheard wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Apple isn't playing the same game as everyone else. They have the money and clout to buy out TSMCs bleeding-edge processes and leave everyone else with the scraps, and their silicon is only sold in machines with extremely fat margins that can easily absorb the BOM cost of making huge chips on the most expensive processes money can buy.

Bleeding edge processes is what Intel specializes in. Unlike Apple, they don’t need TSMC. This should have been a huge advantage for Intel. Maybe that’s why Gelsinger got the boot.

Intel Arc hardware is manufactured by TSMC, specifically on N6 and N5 for this latest announcement.

Intel doesn't currently have nodes competitive with TSMC or excess capacity in their better processes.

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

#270

Post by jsheard »

p1esk wrote: post #262
jsheard wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Apple isn't playing the same game as everyone else. They have the money and clout to buy out TSMCs bleeding-edge processes and leave everyone else with the scraps, and their silicon is only sold in machines with extremely fat margins that can easily absorb the BOM cost of making huge chips on the most expensive processes money can buy.

Bleeding edge processes is what Intel specializes in. Unlike Apple, they don’t need TSMC. This should have been a huge advantage for Intel. Maybe that’s why Gelsinger got the boot.

Intel's foundry side has been floundering so hard that they've resorted to using TSMC themselves in an attempt to keep up with AMD. Their recently launched CPUs are a mix of Intel-made and TSMC-made chiplets, but the latter accounts for most of the die area.
Post reply on HN