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Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

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Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

#71

Post by baq »

bildung wrote: post #70
baq wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’d be a disaster for Intel if it sold for less than 3k, personally I think they’re aiming for break even at 5k a pop at least, and I wouldn’t be surprised to advertise 2x memory at half nvidia price, which would put it at ~15-20k? and a healthy margin which they need like oxygen now. Of course it’s all for naught if it doesn’t perform compute-wise.

I also think they have to be substantially cheaper than nvidia to have any chance, but the pro 6000 with 96G is already available at 7-8k - so half the price would have to be significantly below 4k.

Huh didn’t know that, nice. Intel’s still in trouble then :) IMHO they’ll try to sell the increased ram as worth the ‘premium’ (or, worth the ‘reduced not-nvidia penalty’)

Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

#72

Post by p_l »

adastra22 wrote: post #61
shwaj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they’re using “vector” in the linear algebra sense, e.g. multiplying a matrix and a vector produces a different vector. Not, as I assume you mean, vector graphics like SVG, and renderers like Skia.

Nope, I mean it in the first sense. That happened with the GeForce 256 in 1999, and shader registers (the first programmable vector math) were introduced with the GeForce 3 in 2001. Before that 3D graphics accelerators -- the term GPU had not yet been invented -- simply handled rasterization of triangles, and texture look-ups. Transformation & lighting was handled on the CPU.

(I will use "GPU" because "3d accelerator" was very gaming PC oriented term predated by 3d graphic hardware for decade)

Only in consumer market - which is why GeForce 256 release had the game devs with engines using GL smug for immediately benefiting from hardware T&L which was the original function of earlier GPUs (to the point that more than one "3D GPU" was an i860 or few with custom firmware and some DMA glue to do... mostly vector ops on transforms (and a bit of lighting, as a treat).

The consumer PC market looked differently because games wanted textures, and the first truly successful 3D accelerator was 3Dfx Voodoo which was essentially a rasterizer chip and texture mapping chip, with everything else done on CPU.

Fully programmable GPUs were also a thing in the 2D era, with things like TIGA, where at least one package I heard of pretty much implemented most of the X11 on the GPU.

This was of course all driven by what the market demanded. Original "GPUs" were driven by the needs of professional work like CAD, military, etc. where most of the time you were operating in wireframe and using gouraud/phong shaded triangles was for fancier visualizations.

Games on the other hand really wanted textures (though limitations of consoles like PSX meant that some games were mostly simple colour shaded triangles, like Crash Bandicoot), offloading of which was major improvement for gaming.

Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

#73

Post by magicalhippo »

Neywiny wrote: post #20
schmorptron wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not that low, but given it's using LPDDR5 instead of GDDR7, at least the ram should be a lot cheaper.

Certainly an interesting choice. Dramatically worse performance but dramatically larger only time will tell how it actually goes

With 160GB, surely they can add more channels to compensate?

Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

#74

Post by viraptor »

silisili wrote: post #54

Between 18A becoming viable and this, it seems Intel is finally climbing out of the hole it's been in for years. Makes me wonder whether Gelsinger put all this in motion, or if the new CEO lit a fire under everyone. Kinda a shame if it's the former...

Gelsinger had a long term realistic plan. He was out around 11 months ago. You can't magic a new GPU in that timeframe - those projects have 3+ years pipelines for CPUs. I assume GPU will be a bit shorter, but not that much.

Whatever happened with new products today must've been started before he left.

Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

#75

Post by Sesse__ »

gary_0 wrote: post #59
boomskats wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you s/graphics/3d graphics does that still hold true?

Yes. The earliest consumer PC 3D graphics cards just rasterized pre-transformed triangles and that's it; the CPU had to do pretty much all the math (but drawing the pixels was considered the hard part). Later, "Hardware Transform and Lighting (T&L)" was introduced circa 2000 by cards like the GeForce 256.

And even then, you couldn't really get any sort of serious matmul out of it; they were per-vertex, not per-pixel.

Per-pixel matmul (which is what you really need for anything resembling GPGPU) came with Shader Model 2.0, circa 2002; Radeon 9700, the GeForce FX series and the likes. CUDA didn't exist (nor really any other form of compute shaders), but you could wrangle it with pixel shaders, and some of us did.

Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

#77

Post by roenxi »

makapuf wrote: post #29

Funny they still call them graphics cards when they're really... I dont know, matmul cards ? Tensor cards ? TPU ? Well that sums it up maybe, what those are are really CUDA cards.

Graphics cards haven't ever done graphics. Graphics is a screen thing. Nobody looks at their graphics card to see little pictures. So they are still misnamed, but they've always been misnamed. They do BLAS.

Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

#78

Post by pjmlp »

adastra22 wrote: post #37
halJordan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, this is asinine. Graphics cards have been doing matrix and vector operations since they were invented. No one had a problem with calling matrix multiplers graphics cards until it became cool to hate AI.

It was many generations before vector operations were moved onto graphics chips.

Only for those not following history of graphics chips.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010

> The TMS34010 can execute general purpose programs and is supported by an ANSI C compiler.

> The successor to the TMS34010, the TMS34020 (1988), provides several enhancements including an interface for a special graphics floating point coprocessor, the TMS34082 (1989). The primary function of the TMS34082 is to allow the TMS340 architecture to generate high quality three-dimensional graphics. The performance level of 60 million vertices per second was advanced at the time.

Like these, there were several others other the IBM PC own history.

Re: Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

#79

Post by pjmlp »

adastra22 wrote: post #61
shwaj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they’re using “vector” in the linear algebra sense, e.g. multiplying a matrix and a vector produces a different vector. Not, as I assume you mean, vector graphics like SVG, and renderers like Skia.

Nope, I mean it in the first sense. That happened with the GeForce 256 in 1999, and shader registers (the first programmable vector math) were introduced with the GeForce 3 in 2001. Before that 3D graphics accelerators -- the term GPU had not yet been invented -- simply handled rasterization of triangles, and texture look-ups. Transformation & lighting was handled on the CPU.

On PCs, UNIX world was already exploring Renderman by then.
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