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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

#311

Post by ksec »

treprinum wrote: post #299
ksec wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>For some reason.....

They already replied with an answer.

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

#312

Post by dgfitz »

lyime wrote: post #294
dgfitz wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Stale money is moving around. Nothing changed .

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

#313

Post by throwaway48476 »

dgfitz wrote: post #147
jmward01 wrote: post #103

12GB max is a non-starter for ML work now. Why not come out with a reasonably priced 24gb card even if it isn't the fastest and target it at the ML dev world? Am I missing something here?

ML is about hit another winter. Maybe intel is ahead of industry. Or we can keep asking high computers questions about programming.

The survivors of the AI winter are not the dinosaurs but the small mammals that can profit by dramatically reducing the cost of AI inference in a minimum Capex environment.

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

#314

Post by timschmidt »

pixelpoet wrote: post #310
timschmidt wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

That 128gb is hanging off a dual channel memory bus with only 128 total bits of bandwidth. Which is why you need the GPU. The Epyc and Xeon CPUs I'm discussing have 6x the memory bandwidth, and will trade blows with that GPU.

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

#315

Post by zokier »

rbanffy wrote: post #5

For me, the most important feature is Linux support. Even if I'm not a gamer, I might want to use the GPU for compute and buggy proprietary drivers are much more than just an inconvenience.

Sure, but open drivers have been AMDs selling point for a decade, and even nVidia is finally showing signs of opening up. So it's bit dubious if these new Intels really can compete on this front, at least for very long.

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

#316

Post by HeatrayEnjoyer »

dgfitz wrote: post #312
lyime wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Stale money is moving around. Nothing changed .

What is stale money?

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

#317

Post by WanderPanda »

bayindirh wrote: post #307
throwaway48476 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No you don‘t need much bandwidth between cards for inference

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

#318

Post by pixelpoet »

timschmidt wrote: post #314
pixelpoet wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

That 128gb is hanging off a dual channel memory bus with only 128 total bits of bandwidth. Which is why you need the GPU. The Epyc and Xeon CPUs I'm discussing have 6x the memory bandwidth, and will trade blows with that GPU.

At a mere 20x the cost or something, to say nothing about the motherboard etc :( 500 eur for 16GB of 1TB/s with tons of fp32 (and even fp64! The main reason I bought it) back in 2019 is no joke.

Believe me, as a lifelong hobbyist-HPC kind of person, I am absolutely dying for such a HBM/fp64 deal again.

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

#319

Post by zokier »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #24

I wonder how many transistors it has and what the chip size it is. For power, it's 190W compared to 4060's 115 W. EDIT: from [1]: B580 has 21.7 billion transistors at 406 mm² die area, compared to 4060's 18.9 billion and 146 mm². That's a big die. [1] https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/arc-b580.c4244

> Both the Arc B580 and B570 are based on the "BMG-G21" a new monolithic silicon built on the TSMC 5 nm EUV process node. The silicon has a die-area of 272 mm², and a transistor count of 19.6 billion

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-arc-b580-battlemage...

These numbers seem bit more believable

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

#320

Post by throwaway48476 »

heraldgeezer wrote: post #246
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's insane how out of touch people can be here, lol

I have been trying to hold my slurs in reading this thread. These ML AI Macbook people are legit insane. Desktops and gaming is ugly and complex to them (because lego is hard and macbook look nice unga bunga), yet it is a mass market Intel wants to move in on. People here complain because Intel is not making a cheap GPU to "make AI" on when that's a market of maybe 1000 people. This Intel card is perfect for an espor…

Intel GPUs don't sell well to gamers. They've been on the market for years now.

>market of maybe 1000 people

The market of people interested in local ai inference is in the millions. If it's cheap enough the data center market is at least 10 million.

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