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

phoronix.com

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

#291
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coordi…

How does any of this make money?

Having the complete ecosystem affords them significant margins.

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

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

if you can see the pixels on a 27 inch 1440p display, you're just sitting too close to the screen lol

I don't directly see the pixels per se like on 1080p at 27-inch at desktop distances. But I see harsh edges in corners and text is not flawless like on 2160p.

Like I said, it's on the cusp of invisible pixels.

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

#294
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coordi…

How does any of this make money?

What?

It's like the most profitable set of products in tech. You have companies like Meta, MSFT, Amazon, Google etc spending $5B every few years buying this hardware.

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

#295
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coordi…

How does any of this make money?

When this walled garden is the only way to use GPUs with high efficiency and everybody is using this stack, and NVIDIA controlling the supply of these "platform boards" to OEMs, they don't make money, but they literally print it.

However, AMD is coming for them because a couple of high profile supercomputer centers (LUMI, Livermore, etc.) are using Instinct cards and pouring money to AMD to improve their cards and stack.

I have not used their (Instinct) cards, yet, but their Linux driver architecture is way better than NVIDIA.

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

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gaming at 2160p is just too expensive still, imo. You gotta pay more for your monitor, GPU and PSU. Then if you want side monitors that match in resolution, you're paying more for those as well. You say PC gamers at the start of your comment and gaming PC enthusiasts at the end. These groups are not the same and I'd say the latter is largely doing ultrawide, 4k monitor or even 4k TV. According to steam, 56% are on 10…

> You say PC gamers at the start of your comment and gaming PC enthusiasts at the end. These groups are not the same

Prove to me those aren't synonyms.

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

#297
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".

Intel has earned a lot of credit in the Linux space.

Nvidia is trash tier in terms of support and only recently making serious steps to actually support the platform.

AMD went all in nearly a decade ago and it's working pretty well for them. They are mostly caught up to being Intel grade support in the kernel.

Meanwhile, Intel has been doing this since I was in college. I was running the i915 driver in Ubuntu 20 years ago. Sure their chips are super low power stuff, but what you can do with them and the level of software support you get is unmatched. Years before these other vendors were taking the platform seriously Intel was supporting and funding Mesa development.

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

#298
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".

If it works well on Linux there's a market for that. AMD are hinting that they will be focusing on iGPUs going forward (all power to them, their iGPUs are unmatched and NVIDIA is dominating dGPU). Intel might be the savior we need. Well, Intel and possibly NVK. Had this been available a few weeks ago I would have gone through the pain of early adoption. Sadly it wasn't just an upgrade build for me, so I didn't have t…

AMD has some great iGPUs but it seems like they're still planning to compete in the dGPU space just not at the high end of the market.

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

#299
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For some reason Apple did it with M3/M4 Max likely by folks that are also on HN. The question is how many of the years spent designing HW were spent also by educating oneselves on the latest best ways to do it.

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

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And indeed that's exactly what will be required for any serious attempt to cut into their monopoly position. You misunderstand why and how Nvidia is a monopoly. Many companies make GPUs, and all those GPUs can be used for computation if you develop compute shaders for them. This part is not the problem, you can already go buy cheaper hardware that outperforms Nvidia if price is your only concern. Software is the is…

I do not misunderstand why Nvidia has a monopoly. You jumped drastically beyond anything I was discussing and incorrectly assumed ignorance on my part. I never said why I thought they had one. I never brought up matters of performance or software or moats at all. I matter of fact stated they had a monopoly, you assumed the rest. It's impossible to assail their monopoly without utilizing far lower prices, coming up un…

Nvidia's monopoly is pretty much detached from price at this point. That's the entire reason why they can charge insane margins - nobody cares! There is not a single business squaring Nvidia up with serious intent to take down CUDA. It's been this way for nearly two decades at this point, with not a single spark of hope to show for it.

In the case of ARM, Office, Linux, Huawei, and ChromeOS, these were all actual alternatives to the incumbent tools people were familiar with. You can directly compare Office and Lotus because they are fundamentally similar products - ARM had a real chance against x86 because wasn't a complex ISA to unseat. Nvidia is not analogous to these businesses because they occupy a league of their own as the provider of CUDA. It's not exaggeration to say that they have completely seceded from the market of GPUs and can sustain themselves on demand from crypto miners and AI pundits alone.

AMD, Intel and even Apple have bigger things to worry about than hitting an arbitrary price point, if they want Nvidia in their crosshairs. All of them have already solved the "sell consumer tech at attractive prices" problem but not the "make it complex, standardize it and scale it up" problem.

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