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?
Who cares?
Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
581–590 of 722 posts
Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#582I wanted Intel to do well so I purchased an ARC card. The problem is not the hardware. For some games, it worked fine, but in others, it kept crashing left and right. After updates to drivers, crashing was reduced, but it still happened. Driver software is not easy to develop thoroughly. Even AMD had problems when compared to Nvidia when AMD really started to enter the GPU game after buying ATI. AMD has long since so…
It's also a hardware problem. For example, Alchemist's EUs being SIMD8 but games requiring SIMD16, so it needs to be dispatched to two EUs in a lockstep, or the lack of support for Execute Indirect instruction commonly used in UE5 games, which is currently emulated in software, makes game compatibility a very hit-or-miss.
Battlemage is supposed to fix all these architectural issues. EU in Xe2 is now SIMD16 (which is why the number of EUs per Xe2 core is halved from that of Xe1), and they've added all the previously software-emulated instructions, including Execute Indirect, so in theory Battlemage should be in a much better position in game compatibility side of things.
On Linux side of things, lacking sparse residency support in i915 also contributes to game compatibility[1] (though this is now available under Mesa 24). This is something the new xe driver is supposed to fix, but it's still a long way to go until it's actually usable.
Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#583Why 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 question is is there a real market for this? I do think it could bootstrap from local inference enthousiasts, but it is not clearcut.
Rather than go all in with 128GB, they could test the waters easily with a cheap 32GB offering and take ot from there.
Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#584Earlier quoted context omitted.
The M4 Max needs an enormous 512bit memory bus to extract enough bandwidth out of those LPDDR5x chips, while the GPUs that Intel just launched are 192/160bit and even flagships rarely exceed 384bit. They can't just slap more memory on the board, they would need to dedicate significantly more silicon area to memory IO and drive up the cost of the part, assuming their architecture would even scale that wide without hit…
> They can't just slap more memory on the board, they would need to dedicate significantly more silicon area to memory IO and drive up the cost of the part, In the pedantic sense of just literally slapping more on existing boards? No, they might have one empty spot for an extra BGA VRAM chip, but not enough for the gain's we're talking about. But this is absolutely possible, trivially so for someone like Intel/AMD/NV…
A 128GB VRAM Intel Arc card at a low price would be an OSS developer’s dream come true. It would be the WRT54G of inference.
Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#585I love my a750. Works fantastic out of the box in Linux. He encoding and decoding for every format I use. Flawless support for different screens. I haven't regretted the purchase at all.
I wonder what happened to my brain writing the above. There is a "He" in there that makes no sense. Flawless support for "different" screens? I of course mean "many screens".
Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#586Earlier quoted context omitted.
I presume the counterargument is that inference hosting is commoditized (sort of like how stateless CPU-based containerized workload hosts are commoditized); there’s no margin in that business, because it is parallelizable, and arbitrarily schedulable, and able to be spread across heterogenous hardware pretty easily (just route individual requests to sub-cluster A or B), preventing any kind of lock-in and thus any ki…
Intel does make cards aimed at this space too: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/pro... Coincidentally, it has 128GB of RAM. However, it is not a GPU, is designed to do training too and uses expensive HBM. Modern GPUs can do more than inference/training and the original poster asked about a GPU with 128GB of RAM, not a card that can only do inferencing as you described. Interestingly, Qualcomm…
Back in January, someone on Reddit claimed the list price was $16k.
Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Why would that matter? The game devs are going to spend all their time & effort targetting amd/nvidia. Custom code paths etc. It's not a one size fits all world. OpenCL etc abstraction are good at covering up differences, but not that good. So if you're the player with <10% market share you're going to have an uphill battle to just be on par.
> The game devs are going to spend all their time & effort targetting amd/nvidia. Custom code paths etc. From my experience they target NVidia and Consoles. AMD might get a look at the code just before release if they notice any big problems. I'd be surprised if many Gamedevs even pick up the phone for an Intel GPU developer.
Consoles use AMD GPUs for years now.
Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#588What about sharing GPU across multiple VMs? Isn't Nvidia walled this feature behind unreasonably high price features?
Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#589Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's insane how out of touch people can be here, lol
How big is NVIDIA now? You don't think breaking into that market is a good strategy? And, yes, I understand that this is targeted at gamers and not ML. That was the point of the comment I made. Maybe if they did target ML they would make money and open a path to the massive server market out there.
A video card that beats the 4060 for under $250 is very much going to be a problem for AMD and is going to eat the "low end" market if it is reasonably stable.
Re: Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the reasons GPUs can have multiples of CPU bandwidth is they avoid the difficulties of pluggable dimms - direct soldered can have much higher frequencies at lower power. It's one of the reasons why ARM Macbooks get great performance/watt, memory being even "closer" than mainboard soldered RAM so getting more of those benefits, though naturally less flexibility.
Even DDR5 has this problem. Go look at what soldered DDR5 can do frequency wise compared to DIMMs. It's one of the problems the new CAMM form factor aims to help solve, making it tractable to push the memory frequency up beyond what DIMMs can get yout currently.
I have always wondered: would it be possible to put memory on the back side of the motherboard to get I closer to the CPU? And if it is, would it solve anything else than ram clearance for CPU coolers?