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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

#81

Post by qwytw »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #32
treprinum wrote: post #26

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...

Judging by the number of 16 GB laptops I see around, 128 GB of RAM would probably cost a bajillion dollars

Not the laptop RAM. It costs pennies, Apple's is just charging $200 for 12GB because they can. It's way too slow though..

And Nvidia doesn't want to cannibalize its high end chips but putting more memory into consumer ones.

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

#82

Post by yumraj »

m00x wrote: post #73
treprinum wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

llama.cpp and its derivatives say yes.

This is the most script kiddy comment I've seen in a while. llama.cpp is just inference, not training, and the CUDA backend is still the fastest one by far. No one is even close to matching CUDA on either training or inference. The closest is AMD with ROCm, but there's likely a decade of work to be done to be competitive.

Yes, and inference is a huge market in itself and potentially larger than training (gut feeling haven’t run numbers)

Keep NVIDIA for training and Intel/AMD/Cerebras/… for interference.

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

#83

Post by smcleod »

chessgecko wrote: post #54
treprinum wrote: post #26

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...

GDDR isnt like the ram that connects to cpu, it's much more difficult and expensive to add more. You can get up to 48GB with some expensive stacked gddr, but if you wanted to add more stacks you'd need to solve some serious signal timing related headaches that most users wouldn't benefit from. I think the high memory local inference stuff is going to come from "AI enabled" cpus that share the memory in your computer.…

As someone else said - I don't think you have to have GDDR, surely there are other options. Apple does a great job of it on their APUs with up to 192GB, even an old AMD Threadripper chip can do quite well with its DDR4/5 performance

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

treprinum wrote: post #62
wtallis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

M3/M4 Max MacBooks with 128GB RAM are already way better than an A6000 for very large local LLMs. So even if the GPU is as slow as the one in M3/M4 Max (<3070), and using some basic RAM like LPDDR5x it would still be way faster than anything from NVidia.

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by babypuncher »

jeffbee wrote: post #15
confident_inept wrote: post #13

I'm really curious to see if these still rely heavily on resizable BAR. Putting these in old computers in linux without reBAR support makes the driver crash with literally any load rendering the cards completely unusable. It's a real shame, the single slot a380 is a great performance for price light gaming and general use card for small machines.

What is the newest platform that lacks resizable BAR? It was standardized in 2006. Is 4060-level graphics performance useful in whatever old computer has that problem?

ReBAR was standardized in 2006 but consumer motherboards didn't start shipping with an option to enable it until much later, and didn't start turning it on by default until a few years ago.

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

#87

Post by m00x »

treprinum wrote: post #75
m00x wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the most script kiddy comment I've seen in a while. llama.cpp is just inference, not training, and the CUDA backend is still the fastest one by far. No one is even close to matching CUDA on either training or inference. The closest is AMD with ROCm, but there's likely a decade of work to be done to be competitive.

Inference on very large LLMs where model + backprop exceed 48GB is already way faster on a 128GB MacBook than on NVidia unless you have one of those monstrous Hx00s with lots of RAM which most devs don't.

Because the CPU has to load the model in parts for every cycle so you're spending a lot of time on IO and it offsets processing.

You're talking about completely different things here.

It's fine if you're doing a few requests at home, but if you're actually serving AI models, CUDA is the only reasonable choice other than ASICs.

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

#88

Post by Muskyinhere »

yumraj wrote: post #82
m00x wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the most script kiddy comment I've seen in a while. llama.cpp is just inference, not training, and the CUDA backend is still the fastest one by far. No one is even close to matching CUDA on either training or inference. The closest is AMD with ROCm, but there's likely a decade of work to be done to be competitive.

Yes, and inference is a huge market in itself and potentially larger than training (gut feeling haven’t run numbers) Keep NVIDIA for training and Intel/AMD/Cerebras/… for interference.

NVidia Blackwell is not just a GPU. Its a Rack with a interconnect through a custom Nvidia based Network.

And it needs liquid cooling.

You don't just plugin intel cards 'out of the box'.

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

#89

Post by machinekob »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #35
rmm wrote: post #9

I put an a360 Card into an old machine I turned into a plex server. It turned it into a transcoding powerhouse. I can do multiple indepdent streams now without it skipping a beat. Price-performance ratio was off the chart

Any idea how that compares to Apple Silicon for that job? I bought the $599 MacBook Air with M1 as my plex server for this reason. Transcodes 4k HEVC and doesn’t even need a fan. Sips watts.

Apple Silicon still don't support AV1 encoding but it is good enough for simple Jellyfin server i'm using one myself

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

#90

Post by jeffbee »

tremon wrote: post #29
jeffbee wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the newest platform that lacks resizable BAR? It was standardized in 2006. Is 4060-level graphics performance useful in whatever old computer has that problem?

The newest platform is probably POWER10. ReBar is not supported on any POWER platform, most likely including the upcoming POWER11. Also, I don't think you'll find many mainboards from 2006 supporting it. It may have been standardized in 2006, but a quick online search leads me to think that even on x86 mainboards it didn't become commonly available until at least 2020.

Congrats on a pretty niche reply. I wonder if literally anyone has tried to put an ARC dGPU in a POWER system. Maybe someone from Libre-SOC will chime in.
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