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

phoronix.com

501–510 of 722 posts

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

#501

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…

The major drawback for PC gaming at 4k that I never see mentioned is how much heat the panels generate. Many of them generate so much heat that rely on active cooling! I bought a pair of high refresh 4k displays and combined with the PC, they raised my room to an uncomfortable temperature. I returned them for other reasons (hard to justify not returning them when I got laid off a week after purchasing them), but I've…

>hard to justify not returning them when I got laid off a week after purchasing them

Ouch, had something similar happen to me before when I bought a VR headset and had to return it. Wishing you the best on your job search!

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

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently recently upgraded my main monitor from 1440p x 144hz to 4K x 144hz (with lots of caveats) and I agree with your assessment. If I had not made significant compromises, it would have cost at least $500 to get a decent monitor, which most people are not willing to spend. Even with this monitor, I'm barely able to run it with my (expensive, though older) graphics card, and the screen alarmingly flashes wheneve…

Why do you need two DP cables? Is there not enough bandwidth in a single one? I use a 4k@60 display, which is the maximum my cheap Anker USB-C Hub can manage.

If you're on an Nvidia 4000 series DisplayPort is limited to 1.4, ~26 Gigabit/s.

https://linustechtips.com/topic/729232-guide-to-display-cabl... is a calculator for bandwidth 4K@144 HDR is ~40 Gigabit/s. You can do better with compression, but I find Nvidia cards have an issue with compression enabled.

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

#503

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…

Off the topoc. I think, in the long-term , inference should be done along with some kind of training.

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

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently recently upgraded my main monitor from 1440p x 144hz to 4K x 144hz (with lots of caveats) and I agree with your assessment. If I had not made significant compromises, it would have cost at least $500 to get a decent monitor, which most people are not willing to spend. Even with this monitor, I'm barely able to run it with my (expensive, though older) graphics card, and the screen alarmingly flashes wheneve…

Why do you need two DP cables? Is there not enough bandwidth in a single one? I use a 4k@60 display, which is the maximum my cheap Anker USB-C Hub can manage.

I'm not sure, but there's an in-depth exploration of the monitor here: https://tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/acer_nitro_xv273k.htm

Reddit also seems to have some people who have managed to get 144 with FreeSync, but I've only managed 120.

Funnily enough while I was typing this Netflix caused both my monitors to blackscreen (some sort of NVIDIA reset I think) and then come back. It's not totally stable!

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

#505
post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Inferencing is much more simple than you think: See the precompute_input_logits() and forward() functions here: https://github.com/ryao/llama3.c/blob/master/run.c#L520 As a preface, precompute_input_logits() is really just a generalized version of the forward() function that can operate on multiple input tokens at a time to do faster input processing, although it can be used in place of the forward() function for out…

I am favoriting this comment for reference later when I start poking around in the base level stuff. I find it pretty funny how simple this stuff can get. Have you messed with ternary computing inference yet? I imagine that shrinks the list even further - or at least reduces the compute requirements in favor of brute force addition. https://arxiv.org/html/2410.00907

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

#506
post #53

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…

It is possible to have multiple memory ranks to reduce the bus width requirements for a given amount of memory. Nvidia has demonstrated that this is doable with GDDR6X on the RTX 3090. The RTX 3090 has a 384-bit bus with 24 memory ICs, despite only needing 12 to reach 384-bit. That means it has every two chips sharing one 32-bit interface, which is a dual rank configuration. If you look at the history of computer memory, you can find many examples of multi-rank configurations. I also recall LR-DIMMs as being another way of achieving this.

Achieving 128GB VRAM with a 256-bit bus (which seems like a reasonable bus width) would mean some multiple of 8 chips. If Micron, Samsung or SK Hynix made 128Gb GDDR7 chips, then 8 would suffice. The best right now seems 24Gb, although 32Gb seems likely to follow (and it would likely come sooner if a large customer such as Intel asked for it), so they would just need to have 32 chips in a quad rank configuration to achieve 128GB.

This assumes that there is no limit in the GDDR7 specification that prevents quad rank configurations. If there is and it still supports dual rank like GDDR6X did, then a 512-bit bus could be done. It would likely be extremely pricy and require a new chip tape out that has much more IO logic transistors to handle the additional bus width (and IO logic transistor scaling is dead, so the die area would be huge), but it is hypothetically possible. Given how much people are willing to pay for more VRAM, it could make business sense to do.

Even if there is no limit in the GDDR7 specification that prevents quadrank, their memory IO logic would need to support it and if it does not, they would need to redesign that and do a new chip tape out in addition to a new board design. This would also be very expensive, although not as expensive as going to a 512-bit memory interface.

In summary, adding more memory would cost more to do and it would not improve competitiveness in the target market for these cards, which I imagine is the main reason that they do not do it.

By the way, the reason that Nvidia implemented support for 2 chips per channel is because they wanted to be able to reach 48GB VRAM on the workstation variant of the 3090 that is known as the RTX A6000 (non-Ada). I do not know why they used 24x 8Gb chips rather than 12x 16Gb on the 3090, although if I had to guess, it had something to do with rank interleaving.

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

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going off of how the 4090 and 7900 xtx is arranged I think you could maybe fit on or two chips more around the die over their 12, but that's still a far cry from 128. That would probably just need a shared bus like normal DDR as you're not fitting that much with 16 gbit density

What if we did what others suggested was the practical limit - 48GB. Then just put 2-3 cards in the system and maybe had a little bridge over a separate bus for them to communicate?

I believe that would need some software work from Intel where they're lacking a bit now with their delayed start. Not sure how the frameworks themselves split up the inference work to avoid crossing GPUs as the bandwidth is horrible there.

If we're being reasonable and say that you're not using a modern HEDT CPU that costs a couple thousand, the best a consumer botherboard can get right now would be 2x 8x PCIe gen 5 at 32GB/s and one chipset x8 PCIe gen 4 at 16GB/s. I'm not sure if a motherboard like that actually exists but Intel's chipset should allow it; AMD only does x4 to chipset so the third slot is limited by that

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

#508

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.

For now. This might very well change once the general public realizes they can be movie directors (or generative world gamers) just by downloading some model and plugging in an eGPU. The potential inference market is huge

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

#509
I’ll pick up a B580 to see how it works with Jellyfin transcoding, OBS streaming using AV1, and, with some luck, Davinci Resolve. Maybe a little Blender?

Other exciting tests will include things like fan control, since that’s still an issue with Arc GPUs.

Should make for a fun blog post.

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

#510

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...

Because you can't stack that much ram on a GPU without sufficient channels to do so. You could probably do 64GB on GDDR6 but you can't do 128GB on GDDR6 without more memory channels. 2GB per chip per channel is the current limit for GDDR6 this is why HBM was invented. It is why you can only see GPUs with 24GB of memory at the moment. HBM2 can handle 64GB ( 4 x 8GB Stack ) ( Total capacity 128GB ) HBM3 can handle 192G…

Look at the RTX 3090 and RTX A6000 (the non-Ada one). They both have 24 memory chips with a 384-bit memory bus, but one has 24GB of VRAM and the other has 48GB of VRAM. They both have two chips per channel. This breaks the 24GB VRAM limit that you claim to exist.
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