Typical, they release this on the day I pick up a brand new A770 16gb to toy with LLM stuff.
ah well. pretty sure it'll do for my needs.
Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
431–440 of 722 posts
Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#432Earlier 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…
Yep, this thread has a good compilation of ROCm woes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34832660
That said, for hobbyist inference on large pretrained models, I think there is an interesting set of possibilities here: maybe a number of operations aren't optimized, and it takes 10x as long to load the model into memory... but all that might not matter if AMD were to be the first to market for 128GB+ VRAM cards that are the only things that can run next-generation open-weight models in a desktop environment, particularly those generating video and images. The hobbyists don't need to optimize all the linear algebra operations that researchers need to be able to experiment with when training; they just need to implement the ones used by the open-weight models.
But of course this is all just wishful thinking, because as others have pointed out, any developments in this direction would require a level of foresight that AMD simply hasn't historically shown.
Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Sucks to really only have one valid option on Linux atm.
I don't think that's a super fair shake? Intel iGPUs have been around for a while if you had a laptop chip or iGPU-enabled desktop chip. They've supported Linux just fine for ages, and will fill any non-3D application you might have.
And Nvidia chips are quite good on Linux nowadays - Wayland has been very usable since the 535-series drivers and nearly flawless since 550. You're right to be apprehensive about proprietary GPU hardware but I think there are plenty of options on the table right now.
Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
> upscaling is absolutely vital for a reasonable experience on some games This strikes me as a bit of a sad state of affairs. We've moved beyond a Parkinson's law of computational resources –usage by games expands to fill the available resources– to resource usage expanding to fill the available resources on the highest end machines unavailable for less than a few thousand dollars... and then using that to train a mo…
Isn't it insane to think that rendering triangles for the visuals in games has gotten so demanding that we need an artificially intelligent system embedded in our graphics cards to paint pixels that look like high definition geometry? What a time to be alive. Our most advanced technology is used to cheat on homework and play video games.
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Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#435Earlier 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…
> ... 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.
There might be an hen-egg problem if the apps end up requiring a 128Gb AI accelerator card. You only get the card if there are apps to run, and you only develop the apps if the cards are wide-spread. With so much RAM, the cards will not be let's-through-them-into-a-cheap-build cheap.
I think there have to be a couple of killer apps that run "OK" with CPU or GPU, but would run tremendously better with such a card.
Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Sucks to really only have one valid option on Linux atm. I don't think that's a super fair shake? Intel iGPUs have been around for a while if you had a laptop chip or iGPU-enabled desktop chip. They've supported Linux just fine for ages, and will fill any non-3D application you might have. And Nvidia chips are quite good on Linux nowadays - Wayland has been very usable since the 535-series drivers and nearly flawle…
The iGPU in my 13900K cannot run my 5K display with decent performance (in a desktop environment). I chalked it up to hardware issues but it could be drivers. I am on Debian Linux.
Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#43712GB 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 still don't understand why graphics cards haven't evolved to include sodimm slots so that the vram can be upgraded by the end user. At this point memory requirements vary so much from gamer to scientist so it would make more sense to offer compute packages with user-supplied memory. tl;dr GPU's need to transition from being add-in cards to being a sibling motherboard. A sisterboard? Not a daughter board.
GDDR does not exist in sodimm form factor.
Intel and AMD internal GPUs can use normal computer RAM. But they are slower for that reason and many others.
Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because Apple isn't playing the same game as everyone else. They have the money and clout to buy out TSMCs bleeding-edge processes and leave everyone else with the scraps, and their silicon is only sold in machines with extremely fat margins that can easily absorb the BOM cost of making huge chips on the most expensive processes money can buy.
> and their silicon is only sold in machines with extremely fat margins Like the brand new Mini that cost 600 USD and went to 500 during Black week.
The 600 mini is on the m4 with the anemic 10 core GPU. This is for grandama or your 10 year old.
The good one which is still slower than m4 max is 2200.
If you want the max you need at least a macbook pro starting at 3200 and if you want the better one with 128G RAM it starts at about 5k
Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copying daemons (gdrcopy) is about pumping data in and out of a single card. docker-nvidia and rest of the stack is enablement for using cards. GPU-Direct is about pumping data from storage devices to cards, esp. from high speed storage systems across networks. MIG actually shares a single card to multiple instances, so many processes or VMs can use a single card for smaller tasks. Nothing I have written in my previo…
Mostly, I think, we don’t really understand your argument that Intel couldn’t easily replicate the parts needed only for inference.
Yeah, for example llama.cpp runs on Intel GPUs via Vulkan or SYCL. The latter is actively being maintained by Intel developers.
Obviously that is only one piece of software, but its a certainly a useful one if you are using one of the many LLMs it supports.
Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Bleeding edge processes is what Intel specializes in. Unlike Apple, they don’t need TSMC. Intel literally outsourced their Arrow Lake manufacturing to TSMC because they couldn't fabricate the parts themselves - their 20A (2nm) process node never reached a production-ready state, and was eventually cancelled about a month ago.
OK, so the question becomes: TSMC could do it. Why can’t Intel?
Intel is maybe a year or two behind TSMC right now. They might or might not catch up since it is a moving target, but I dont think there is anything TSMC is doing today that Intel wont be doing in the near future.