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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

#301

Post by arcticbull »

adventured wrote: post #93
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HBM3E memory is at least 3x the price of DDR5 (it requires 3x the wafer as DDR5) and capacity is sold out for all of 2025 already... that's the price and production bottleneck. High speed, low latency server grade DDR5 is around $800-$1600 for 128GB. Triple that for $2400 - $4800 just for the memory. Still need the GPUs/APUs, card, VRMs, etc. Even the nVidia H100 with "only" 94GB starts at $30k...

Nvidia's $30,000 is a 90% margin product at scale. They could charge 1/3 that and still be very profitable. There has rarely been such a profitable large corporation in terms of the combo of profit & margin. Their last quarter was $35b in sales and $26b in gross profit ($21.8b op income; 62% op income margin vs sales). Visa is notorious for their extreme margin (66% op income margin vs sales) due to being basically a…

Visa doesn't actually make a ton of money off each transaction, if you divide out their revenue against their payment volume (napkin math)...

They processed $12T in payments last year (almost a billion payments per day), with a net revenue of $32B. That's a gross transaction margin of 0.26% and their GAAP net income was half that, about 0.14%. [1]

They're just a transaction network, unlike say Amex which is both an issuer and a network. Being just the network is more operationally efficient.

[1] https://annualreport.visa.com/financials/default.aspx

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

#302

Post by c2h5oh »

ThatMedicIsASpy wrote: post #41
rmm wrote: post #9

I put an a360 Card into an old machine I turned into a plex server. It turned it into a transcoding powerhouse. I can do multiple indepdent streams now without it skipping a beat. Price-performance ratio was off the chart

My 7950X3Ds GPU does 4k HDR (33Mb/s) to 1080p at 40fps (proxmox, jellyfin). If these GPUs would support SR-IOV I would grab one for transcoding and GPU accelerated remote desktop. Untouched video (star wars 8) 4k HDR (60Mb/s) to 1080p at 28fps

All first gen arc gpus share the same video encoder/decoder, including the sub-$100 A310, that can handle four (I haven't tested more than two) simultaneous 4k HDR -> 1080p AV1 transcodes at high bitrate with tone mapping while using 12-15W of power.

No SR-IOV.

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

#303

Post by timschmidt »

pixelpoet wrote: post #265
Der_Einzige wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Both Intel and AMD produce server chips with 12 channel memory these days (that's 12x64bit for 768bit) which combined with DDR5 can push effective socket bandwidth beyond 800GB/s, which is well into the area occupied by single GPUs these days.

You can even find some attractive deals on motherboard/ram/cpu bundles built around grey market engineering sample CPUs on aliexpress with good reports about usability under Linux.

Building a whole new system like this is not exactly as simple as just plugging a GPU into an existing system, but you also benefit from upgradeability of the memory, and not having to use anything like CUDA. llamafile, as an example, really benefits from AVX-512 available in recent CPUs. LLMs are memory bandwidth bound, so it doesn't take many CPU cores to keep the memory bus full.

Another benefit is that you can get a large amount of usable high bandwidth memory with a relatively low total system power usage. Some of AMD's parts with 12 channel memory can fit in a 200W system power budget. Less than a single high end GPU.

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

#304

Post by headgasket »

my hunch is the path forward for intel on both the CPU and the GPU end is to release a series of consumer chipsets with a large number of PCIE 5.0 lanes, and keep iterating this. This would cannibalize some of the datacenter server side revenue, both that's a reboot... get the hackers raving about intel value for the money instead of EPYC. Or do a skunkworks ARM64 M1 like processor; there's a market for this as a datacenter part...

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

#305

Post by [deleted] »

whatudb wrote: post #63
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...

Meta comment: "why don't they just" phrase usually indicates significant ignorance about a subject, it's better to learn a little bit before dispensing criticism about beancounters or whatnot. In this case, the die I/O limits precludes more than a reasonable number of DDR channels.

[deleted]

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

#306

Post by ksec »

wtallis wrote: post #53
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...

Just how "basic" do you think a GPU can be while having the capability to interface with that much DRAM? Getting there with GDDR6 would require a really wide memory bus even if you could get it to operate with multiple ranks. Getting to 128GB with LPDDR5x would be possible with the 256-bit bus width they used on the top parts of the last generation, but would result in having half the bandwidth of an already mediocre…

Thank You Wtallis. Somewhere along the line, this basic "knowledge" of hardware is completely lost. I dont expect this to be explained in any comment section on old Anandtech. It seems hardware enthusiast has mostly disappeared, I guess that is also why Anandtech closed. We now live in a world where most site are just BS rumours.

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

#307

Post by bayindirh »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #288
bayindirh wrote: post #264

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…

All of that is highly relevant for training but what the poster was asking for is a desktop inference card.

You use at least half of this stack for desktop setups. You need copying daemons, the ecosystem support (docker-nvidia, etc.), some of the libraries, etc. even when you're on a single system.

If you're doing inference on a server; MIG comes into play. If you're doing inference on a larger cloud, GPU-direct storage comes into play.

It's all modular.

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

#308

Post by Novosell »

philistine wrote: post #296
Novosell wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Prove to me they are.

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

#309

Post by treprinum »

p1esk wrote: post #257
treprinum wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think plenty of enthusiastic open source devs would jump at it and fix their software if the software was reasonably open. The same effect as what happened when Meta released LLaMA.

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

#310

Post by pixelpoet »

timschmidt wrote: post #303
pixelpoet wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Both Intel and AMD produce server chips with 12 channel memory these days (that's 12x64bit for 768bit) which combined with DDR5 can push effective socket bandwidth beyond 800GB/s, which is well into the area occupied by single GPUs these days. You can even find some attractive deals on motherboard/ram/cpu bundles built around grey market engineering sample CPUs on aliexpress with good reports about usability under Li…

My desktop machine has had 128gb since 2018, but for the AI workloads currently commanding almost infinite market value, it really needs the 1TB/s bandwidth and teraflops that only a bona fide GPU can provide. An early AMD GPU with these characteristics is the Radeon VII with 16gb HBM, which I bought for 500 eur back in 2019 (!!!).

I'm a rendering guy, not an AI guy, so I really just want the teraflops, but all GPU users urgently need a 3rd market player.

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