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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

#401

Post by evantbyrne »

Novosell wrote: post #192
philistine wrote: post #158

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…

Not rich. Well within reach for Americans with expendable income. Mid range 16" macbook pros are in the same price ballpark as 4k gaming rigs. Or put another way costs less than a vacation for two to a popular destination.

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

#402

Post by heraldgeezer »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #320
heraldgeezer wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, Intel cards have sucked. But they are trying again!

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

#403

Post by oivey »

arcticbull wrote: post #301
adventured wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

That’s a weird way to account for their business size. There isn’t a significant marginal cost per transaction. They didn’t sell $12T in products. They facilitated that much in payments. Their profits are fantastic.

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

#404

Post by throwaway48476 »

refulgentis wrote: post #349
throwaway48476 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel sold their GPUs at negative margin which is part of why the stock fell off a cliff. If they could double the vram they could raise the price into the green even selling thousands, likely closer to 100k, would be far better than what they're doing now. The problem is Intel is run by incompetent people who guard their market segments as tribal fiefs instead of solving for the customer.

By subsidizing it more they'll lose less money?

Increasing VRAM would differentiate intel GPUs and allow driving higher ASPs, into the green.

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

#405

Post by [deleted] »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #212
hajile wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Launching a new SKU for $500-1000 with 48gb of RAM seems like a profitable idea. The GPU isn't top-of-the-line, but the RAM would be unmatched for running a lot of models locally.

It's not technically possible to just slap on more RAM. GDDR6 is point-to-point with option for clamshell, and the largest chips in mass production are 16Gbit/32 bit. So, for a 192bit card, the best you can get is 192/32×16Gbit×2 = 24GB. To have more memory, you have to design a new die with a wider interface. The design+test+masks on leading edge silicon is tens of millions of NRE, and has to be paid well over a yea…

[deleted]

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

#406

Post by archagon »

Novosell wrote: post #192
philistine wrote: post #158

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…

I don’t think that’s true anymore. I routinely find 4K/27” monitors for under $100 on Craigslist, and a 3080-equivalent is still good enough to play most games on med-high settings at 4K and ~90Hz, especially if DLSS is available.

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

#407

Post by renecito »

bayindirh wrote: post #264
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 coordi…

> ... local generative AI lunch

I agree, just for my PC, something that'd enable small devs to create interesting foundation model apps that'd deploy to users using this local AI cards to run these new Apps.

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

#408

Post by JohnBooty »

philistine wrote: post #158
giobox wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure its been a sweet spot for a very long time for budget conscious gamers looking for best balance of price and frame rates, but 1440p optimized parts are nothing new. Both NVidia and AMD make parts that target 1440p display users too, and have done for years. Even previous Intel parts you can argue were tailored for 1080p/1440p use, given their comparative performance deficit at 4k etc. Assuming they retail at…

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.

I don't see anybody thinking 1440p is "endgame," as opposed to a pretty nice compromise at the moment.

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

#409

Post by fngjdflmdflg »

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?

I think a lot of replies to this post are missing that Intel's last graphics card wasn't received well by gamers due to poor drivers. The GT 730 from 2014 has more users than all Arc cards combined according to the latest Steam survey.[0] It's entirely possible that making a 24gb local inference card would do better since they can contribute patches for inference libraries directly like they did for llama.cpp, as opposed to a gaming card where the support surface is much larger. I wish Intel well in any case and hope their drivers (or driver emulators) improve enough to be considered broadly usable.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/ - 0.19% share

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

#410

Post by qwytw »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #144
elorant wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it though? How many people are running inference at home? Outside of enthusiasts I don't know anyone. Even companies don't self-host models and prefer to use APIs. Not that I wouldn't like a consumer GPU with tons of VRAM, but I think that the market for it is quite small for companies to invest building it. If you bother to look at Steam's hardware stats you'll notice that only a small percentage is using high…

This is the weird part, I saw the same comments in other threads. People keep saying how everyone yearns for local LLMs… but other than hardcore enthusiasts it just sounds like a bad investment? Like it’s a smaller market than gaming GPUs. And by the time anyone runs them locally, you’ll have bigger/better models and GPUs coming out, so you won’t even be able to make use of them. Maybe the whole “indoctrinate users t…

Enthusiast/Prosumer/etc. market is generally still usually highly in most markers even if the revenue is limited. e.g. if hobbyists/students/developers start using Intel GPUs in a few years the enterprise market might become much less averse to buying Intel's datacenter chips.
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