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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

#411

Post by qwytw »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #329
tokioyoyo wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> which is part of why the stock fell off a cliff

Was it? Their GPUs sales were insignificantly low so I doubt that had a huge effect on their net income.

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

#412

Post by tgtweak »

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…

I think he's mostly referring to inference and not training, which I entirely agree with - a 4x version of this card for workstations would do really well - even some basic interconnect between the cards a la nvlink would really drive this home.

The training can come after, with some inference and runtime optimizations on the software stack.

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

#413

Post by ThatMedicIsASpy »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #339
ThatMedicIsASpy wrote: post #28

SR-IOV is supported on their iGPUs and outside of it exclusive to their enterprise offering. Give it to me on desktop and I'll buy.

Intel is allergic to competition.

There is no competition. People get old workstation/server cards

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

#414

Post by whalesalad »

zokier wrote: post #315
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.

I welcome a new competitor. Sucks to really only have one valid option on Linux atm. My 6600 is a little long in the tooth. I only have it becuase it is dead silent and runs a 5K display without issue - but I would definitely like to upgrade it for something that can hold its own with ML.

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

#415

Post by RGamma »

dgfitz wrote: post #335
HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is stale money?

Hmm. There is a lot of money that exists, doing nothing. I consider that stale money. Edit: I can’t sort this out. Where did all the money go?

Have you looked under your sofa?

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

#416

Post by westurner »

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…

> "Just add more RAM" doesn't work the way you wish it could.

Re: Tomasulo's algorithm the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42231284

Cerebras WSE-3 has 44 GB of on-chip SRAM per chip and it's faster than HBM. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41702789#41706409

Intel has HBM2e off-chip RAM in Xeon CPU Max series and GPU Max;

What is the difference between DDR, HBM, and Cerebras' 44GB of on-chip SRAM?

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

#417

Post by Wytwwww »

stracer wrote: post #229
ksd482 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the alternative? I think it's the right call since there isn't much competition in GPU industry anyway. Sure, Intel is far behind. But they need to start somewhere in order to break ground. Strictly speaking strategically, my intuition is that they will learn from this, course correct and then would start making progress.

The idea of another competitive GPU manufacturer is nice. But it is hard to bring into existence. Intel is not in a position to invest lots of money and sustained effort into products for which the market is captured and controlled by a much bigger and more competent company on top of its game. Not even AMD can get more market share, and they are much more competent in the GPU technology. Unless NVIDIA and AMD make s…

> maybe memory/solid state drives

That's a very low margin and cyclical market since memory/SSDs are basically commodities. I don't think Intel would have any chance surviving in such a market they just have way to much bloat/R&D spending. Which is not a bad thing as long as you can produce better than products than the competition.

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

#418

Post by Narishma »

hulitu wrote: post #207
bryanlarsen wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are $200 low end cards, the B5X0 cards. Presumably they have B7X0 and perhaps even B9X0 cards in the pipeline as well.

> These are $200 low end cards Hm, i wouldn't consider 200$ low end.

It is when the high end is 1000$ or more.

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

#420

Post by kristianp »

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...

The size of the local inference market is too small. Maybe a couple of thousand LLM enthusiasts? It's not enough to make a profit or even breakeven on the development costs for the hardware.
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