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

phoronix.com

421–430 of 722 posts

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

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is whether there's enough overall demand for a GPU architecture with 4x the VRAM of a 5090 but only about 1/3rd of the bandwidth. At that point it would only really be good for AI inferencing, so why not make specialized inferencing silicon instead?

I genuinely wonder why no one is doing this? Why can't I buy this specialized AI inference silicon with plenty of VRAM?

I guess that would be an NPU combined with LPDDR. Basically any Windows Copilot Plus approved device.

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

#422
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".

It's for the low end gaming market which Nvidia and AMD have been neglecting for years.

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

#423

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…

So what you're saying is Intel, or any other would-be NVIDIA competitor, needs to put out fast interconnects, not just compute cards. This is true.

I'm not sure your argument stands when it comes to OP's idea of a single card with 128GB VRAM. This would be enough to run ~180B models with reasonable quantization --we're not near maxing out the capability of 180B yet (see the latest 32B models performing near public SOTA).

This indeed would push rapid and wide adoption and be quite disruptive. But sure, it wouldn't instantly enable competitive training of 405B models.

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

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible you're underestimating the open source community. If there's a competing platform that hobbyists can tinker with, the ecosystem can improve quite rapidly, especially when the competing platform is completely closed and hobbyists basically are locked out and have no alternative.

> It's possible you're underestimating the open source community. On the contrary. You really don't know how I love and prefer open source and love a more leveling playing field. > If there's a competing platform that hobbyists can tinker with... AMD's cards are better from hardware and software architecture standpoint, but the performance is not there yet. Plus, ROCm libraries are not that mature, but they're gettin…

You're writing as if AMD cares about open source. If they would only actually open source their driver the community would have made their cards better than nvidia ones long ago.

I'm one of those academics. You've got it all wrong. So many people care about open source. So many people carefully release their code and make everything reproducible.

We desperately just want AMD to open up. They just refuse. There's nothing secret going on and there's no conspiracy. There's just a company that for some inexplicable reason doesn't want to make boatloads of money for free.

AMD is the worst possible situation. They're hostile to us and they refuse to invest to make their stuff work.

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

#426

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…

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.

Your hypothetical person has a 3080 but needs to crawl craigslist for a sub-100$ monitor? U guess those people exist, but idk why you'd bother with a 3080 to then buy a low refreh rate, high input latency, probably TN, low color accuracy craigslist runoff.

Could just get a 3060 and a nice 1440p monitor.

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

#427
I actually really like the Arc 770.

However, this is going to go on clearance within 6 months. Good for consumers, bad for Intel.

Also keep in mind for any ML task Nvidia has the best ecosystem around. AMD and Intel are both like 5 years behind to be charitable...

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

#428

Too late, and it has a bad rep. This effort from Intel to sell discrete GPUs is just inertia from old aspirations, won't really help noticeably to save it, as there is not much money in it. Most probably the whole Intel ARC effort will be mothballed, and probably many more will.

"old aspirations"

"there is not much money in it"?

WTF?

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

#429
post #63

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.

Op asked a question and got a bunch of answers "why they couldn't do just that". I think that's a win.

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

#430
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How do architectural bottlenecks due to modified Von Neumann architectures' debuggable instruction pipelines limit computational performance when scaling to larger amounts of off-chip RAM?

Tomasulo's algorithm also centralizes on a common data bus (the CPU-RAM data bus) which is a bottleneck that must scale with the amount of RAM.

Can in-RAM computation solve for error correction without redundant computation and consensus algorithms?

Can on-chip SRAM be built at lower cost?

Von Neumann architecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture#Von_N... :

> The term "von Neumann architecture" has evolved to refer to any stored-program computer in which an instruction fetch and a data operation cannot occur at the same time (since they share a common bus). This is referred to as the von Neumann bottleneck, which often limits the performance of the corresponding system. [4]

> The von Neumann architecture is simpler than the Harvard architecture (which has one dedicated set of address and data buses for reading and writing to memory and another set of address and data buses to fetch instructions).

Modified Harvard architecture > Comparisons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Harvard_architecture

C-RAM: Computational RAM > DRAM-based PIM Taxonomy, See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_RAM

SRAM: Static random-access memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_random-access_memory :

> Typically, SRAM is used for the cache and internal registers of a CPU while DRAM is used for a computer's main memory.

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