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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

#691

Post by ddtaylor »

ryao wrote: post #639
ddtaylor wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel has earned a lot of credit in the Linux space. Nvidia is trash tier in terms of support and only recently making serious steps to actually support the platform. AMD went all in nearly a decade ago and it's working pretty well for them. They are mostly caught up to being Intel grade support in the kernel. Meanwhile, Intel has been doing this since I was in college. I was running the i915 driver in Ubuntu 20 year…

This is repeated often, but I have had very good support from Nvidia on Linux over the years. AMD on the other hand gives lousy support. File a bug report about a problem and expect to be ignored, especially if it has anything to do with emulation. Intel’s Linux support on the other hand has been very good for me too.

> This is repeated often, but I have had very good support from Nvidia on Linux over the years.

They have been improving because getting CUDA running on the platform in datacenters required some level of cooperation. They eventually realized this had to happen regardless for AI in the datacenter and so eventually they got a kernel module starting to be added. It's not really there yet and it doesn't run the actual driver, but it gets a pathway to booting Nvidia with signed drivers among other things.

The end result is our support forums are still full of Nvidia users. Go to any support forum or Reddit related to Linux and view the comments and press CTRL+F for Nvidia. It's so common we have to just tag/bin these posts and move on because there are literally man years of time being wasted on this.

> AMD on the other hand gives lousy support.

I can open a bug right now on both GitHub and the LKMS directly with AMD engineers. When I have a question about ROCm I can ask them and get a quick response. These guys are in Reddit threads talking to ROCm users and giving them guidance on how to modify their consumer grade Radeon cards to use the datacenter grade drivers that aren't adapted to consumer facing cards yet.

The one thing we for sure agree on is that Intel doesn't have any of this BS. Their stuff just works and their pipeline for getting anything fixed is also well optimized.

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

#692

Post by kimixa »

catdog wrote: post #587
kimixa wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah, but the different APIs and system integration (shared memory) means many of the specific tunings and optimizations don't carry over very well.

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

#693

Post by tacticus »

giobox wrote: post #97
declan_roberts wrote: post #86

I think a graphics card tailored for 2k gaming is actually great. 2k really is the goldilocks zone between 4k and 1080p graphics before you start creeping into diminishing returns.

For sure its been a sweet spot for a very long time for budget conscious gamers looking for best balance of price and frame rates, but 1440p optimized parts are nothing new. Both NVidia and AMD make parts that target 1440p display users too, and have done for years. Even previous Intel parts you can argue were tailored for 1080p/1440p use, given their comparative performance deficit at 4k etc. Assuming they retail at…

the 4060 is an "excellent" nvidia product where they managed to release something slower than the cheaper previous gen 3060

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

#694

Post by tacticus »

bjoli wrote: post #590
MindSpunk wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

that's kinda what camm2 is all about. The new interface methods provide a much better link and improve a bunch of stuff but take up more board space.

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

#695

Post by tacticus »

Havoc wrote: post #475
sangnoir wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Too small for ML. What do you mean by this - I assume you mean too small for SoTA LLMs? There are many ML applications where 12GB is more than enough. Even w.r.t. LLMs, not everyone requires the latest & biggest LLM models. Some "small", distilled and/or quantized LLMs are perfectly usable with <24GB

If you're aiming for usable, then sure that works. The gains in model ability from doubling size is quite noticable at that scale though. Still...tangibly cheaper than even a 2nd hand 3090 so there is perhaps a market for it

comparing the bottom of the market cards with a card that is 4+ times the power budget and 6 times the price is um....

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

#696

Post by talldayo »

pjmlp wrote: post #577
talldayo wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering how HN professedly struggles to use non-reversible cables, it wouldn't surprise me if someone started to complain about getting skillchecked by a Molex or SATA. And that CPU, with the little gold tab you gotta line up? That's a whopping three ways you could go wrong! Forget about it, might as well just phone Dell or Apple and pay the idiot tax.

Given my experience with PC parts in the past, most folks would be skillchecked when getting any card for their slots, that don't exactly match the motherboard firmware, bus protocol version or speed, even a x.1 variation makes all the difference. Also better check if the UEFI firmware does understand the nice NVMe SSD brand, version that was bought. Be sure to not fill all the slots either, or ensure the electromagn…

> Also better check if the UEFI firmware does understand the nice NVMe SSD brand, version that was bought.

That's funny! I haven't heard of this being an issue since 2009. And back then, it was an issue with a select few manufacturers that took it upon themselves to modify the stock ACPI tables to behave differently from how the OEM intended it to behave.

Not naming any names, but it really was a pain in the ass for the people that bought commercial dual-boot software and couldn't run ostensibly recent OSes. Something you didn't encounter if you braved the impossible gauntlet of building a PC from scratch, as there was no "we know better than you" interruption from companies with a sizable investment in watching UEFI burn. Of course, you still have to put up with other fierce trials such as "which way does the DIMM line up" and "how do screws work" which will triumph over so-called hackers that thought they were smart enough to build a PC.

Just a thought. Custom PCs will never consume the world, but we are going to point and laugh if you buy a preconfigured rackmount or tower at the sticker price. That's like watching a car enthusiast proudly exit the used Honda dealership after paying three times the Blue Book price for their ride. Puts you up there with Elon and Zuckerberg in the pantheon of people that let FOMO drive irrational hardware purchases.

> Custom PCs aren't IKEA,

Correct, IKEA furniture actually demands literacy from the person installing it.

> I have better things to do.

You're a Hacker News user with 14 years of seniority and enough karma to make the Buddha blush. We both know that if you had anything better to do, you wouldn't be writing paragraph-length replies to arguments you supposedly don't take seriously in the first place. Whatever "better things" exist on your agenda, they must have quite the lengthy refractory period for you to find the time in your horribly busy life for this and the other 63,548 comments you've submit to this site.

If you can't prove that PC building is inconvenient, you can't prove that your time is worth something and you can't prove that your alternative is better value, what are you trying to tell me? That you're lazier than a middle schooler and too dumb to shop at Radioshack? Touché and well met, your rhetoric moves me.

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

#697

Post by blagie »

ryao wrote: post #677
blagie wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVidia would be dramatically affected, just not overnight. If Intel or AMD sold a niche product with 48GB RAM even at a loss, but hit high-end consumer pricing, there would be a flood of people doing various AI work to buy it. The end result would be that parts of NVidia's moat would start draining rather quickly, and AMD / Intel would be in a stronger position for AI products. I use NVidia because when I bought AMD…

> If I could build a cheap system with around 200GB, Even if AMD dropped the price to $2000, you could not be able to build a system with one of these cards. You cannot buy these cards at their current 5 digit pricing. The idea that you could buy it if they dropped the price to $2000 is a fantasy, since others would purchase the supply long before you have a chance to purchase one, just like they do now. AMD is alrea…

Let's compare to see if it's really the same market:

HGX B200: 36 petaflops at FP16. 14.4 terabytes/second bandwidth.

RX4060 (similar to Intel): 15 teraflops at FP16. 272 gigabytes/second bandwidth

Hmmm.... Note the prefixes (peta versus tera)

A lot of that is apples-to-oranges, but that's kind of the point. It's a different market.

A low-performance high-RAM product would not cut into the server market since performance matters. What it would do is open up a world of diverse research, development, and consumer applications.

Critically, even if it were, Intel doesn't play in this market. If what you're saying were to happen, it should be a no-brainer for Intel to launch a low-cost alternative. That said, it wouldn't happen. What would happen is a lot of business, researchers, and individuals would be able to use ≈200GB models on their own hardware for low-scale use.

> By the way, the CUDA moat is overrated since people already implement support for alternatives.

No. It's not. It's perhaps overrated if you're building a custom solution and making the next OpenAI or Anthropic. It's very much not overrated if you're doing general-purpose work and want things to just work.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/hgx/ https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-4060.c4107

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

#698

Post by ryao »

ddtaylor wrote: post #691
ryao wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is repeated often, but I have had very good support from Nvidia on Linux over the years. AMD on the other hand gives lousy support. File a bug report about a problem and expect to be ignored, especially if it has anything to do with emulation. Intel’s Linux support on the other hand has been very good for me too.

> This is repeated often, but I have had very good support from Nvidia on Linux over the years. They have been improving because getting CUDA running on the platform in datacenters required some level of cooperation. They eventually realized this had to happen regardless for AI in the datacenter and so eventually they got a kernel module starting to be added. It's not really there yet and it doesn't run the actual dr…

I have been using the Nvidia driver for many years, had minimal problems and had great responses from Nvidia when I did report issues.

As for opening a bug on GitHub, there is a difference between them responding and them fixing things. I have seen many people report bugs without them fixing the issues. There is one prominent issue for parity between direct3d q2 and vulkan that was needed by emulators that they outright refused to fix:

https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK/issues/108

With Intel, the last time I opened a bug with them, they fixed the issue I reported within 24 hours.

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

#699

Post by ryao »

MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #688
ryao wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is repeated often, but I have had very good support from Nvidia on Linux over the years. AMD on the other hand gives lousy support. File a bug report about a problem and expect to be ignored, especially if it has anything to do with emulation. Intel’s Linux support on the other hand has been very good for me too.

Nvidia desktop GPUs may be fine on Linux now, but are very much still trash on Laptops. I can't even begin to express how troublesome they have been on the work laptops I've been forced to use. I would've killed for any non-Nvidia laptop, even if just integrated graphics, but IT won't approve any other models, and the UEFI lacks an option to fully disable the Nvidia GPU.

On Optimus laptops, I usually disable the Intel GPU rather than deal with GPU switching. Those poor souls that have laptops without a proper multiplexer cannot do that, but I doubt it is a huge problem. With vulkan, you can specify the GPU to use via an environment variable.

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

#700

Post by ryao »

blagie wrote: post #697
ryao wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I could build a cheap system with around 200GB, Even if AMD dropped the price to $2000, you could not be able to build a system with one of these cards. You cannot buy these cards at their current 5 digit pricing. The idea that you could buy it if they dropped the price to $2000 is a fantasy, since others would purchase the supply long before you have a chance to purchase one, just like they do now. AMD is alrea…

Let's compare to see if it's really the same market: HGX B200: 36 petaflops at FP16. 14.4 terabytes/second bandwidth. RX4060 (similar to Intel): 15 teraflops at FP16. 272 gigabytes/second bandwidth Hmmm.... Note the prefixes (peta versus tera) A lot of that is apples-to-oranges, but that's kind of the point. It's a different market. A low-performance high-RAM product would not cut into the server market since perform…

What treprinum suggested was AMD selling their current 192GB enterprise card (MI300X) for $2000, not a low end card. Everything you said makes sense but it is beside the point that was raised above. You want the other discussion about attaching 128GB to a basic GPU. I agree that would be disruptive, but that is a different discussion entirely. In fact, I beat you to saying that would be disruptive by about 16 hours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42315309

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