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Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

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Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#81

Post by culopatin »

bigyabai wrote: post #11
speedgoose wrote: post #7

Time to first token is a very important performance metric, as I figured out using a Mac Studio M3 Ultra (that is quite slow on this aspect). But 32GB for a TDP of 230W is perhaps not super interesting. Especially because you probably want to have more than one card. It's a lot of heat. You could use the cards for heating up a building, but heatpumps exist.

A lot of the TDP is reserved for running the shader units at full-power. My RTX 3070 Ti only pulls ~110w of it's 320w running CUDA inference on Gemma 26b and E4B.

My 4070 super and 5070 super both max out their tdp when I use them with ollama, is your usage different?

Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#82

Post by Readerium »

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #43

There's a tradeoff between dense models and MoEs on memory usage vs. compute for the same quality. For example, Qwen3.5 27B and Qwen3.5 122B A10B have similar average performance across benchmarks. The 122B is much faster to run than the 27B (generates more tokens at the same compute). The 27B, on the other hand, uses ~4x less VRAM at low context lengths (less difference at high context lengths). Right now, different…

LLMs are memory bandwidth bound not compute bound.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#83

Post by reallytD91 »

999900000999 wrote: post #13
driverdan wrote: post #10

From what I've read the Intel drivers are terrible and holding back using them for LLMs.

Everyone has terrible drivers here aside from Nvidia. Intel looks like they'll leave the dedicated GPU space, so it's a bit doubtful if the drivers will ever catch up.

What makes you think Intel will leave the GPU space?

Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#85

Post by [deleted] »

dwoldrich wrote: post #65

Hi Intel, I'm itching to buy an Xe3P! Or, Nova Lake? Crescent Island? Celestial? Jaguar Shores? Whatever the hell you name it doesn't matter to me, I just want a workstation with one of them bad boys attached to 160GB of RAM for legit inference power! I've been saving my money not paying for Claude Code so I can run my own agentic coding setup at home on yours. Please don't charge too much for the workstation class c…

[deleted]

Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#86

Post by 999900000999 »

reallytD91 wrote: post #83
999900000999 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone has terrible drivers here aside from Nvidia. Intel looks like they'll leave the dedicated GPU space, so it's a bit doubtful if the drivers will ever catch up.

What makes you think Intel will leave the GPU space?

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/intel-has-re...

I've seen several stories like this. Which is a shame since Intel offers the best value GPUs on the market.

I guess it's possible they'll still make workstation GPUs while skipping the consumer market.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#87

Post by Mindless2112 »

jaimie wrote: post #80
Mindless2112 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As of b8966, it is still not great. | model | size | params | backend | ngl | test | t/s | | --------------------- | --------: | ------: | ------- | --: | -----: | -------------: | | gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE | 11.27 GiB | 20.91 B | SYCL | 999 | pp2048 | 851.81 ± 6.50 | | gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE | 11.27 GiB | 20.91 B | SYCL | 999 | tg128 | 42.05 ± 1.99 | | gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE | 11.27 GiB | 20.91 B | Vulkan | 999 | pp2048…

"I've no idea why one would use gpt-oss-20b at Q8" - would you mind expanding on this comment? In that particular model family, the choices are 20B and 120B, so 20B higher quant fits in VRAM, while you'd be settling for 120B at a lower quant. Is it that 20B MXFP4 is comparable in performance so no need for Q8? Or is the insight simply that there are better models available now and the emphasis is on gpt-oss-20b, not…

The parameters in the original gpt-oss-20B model are "post-trained with MXFP4 quantization", so there just isn't much to gain by quantizing to Q8. If you look inside the Q8 model, most of the parameters are MXFP4 anyway.

Though, looking inside my "gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE" model, it looks to also be quantized the same way as the Q8, so that was probably an overstatement on my part.

Still, the Q8 is 12.1 GB and the FP16 is 13.8 GB. Not the ~1:2 ratio you might expect.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#88

Post by ondra »

Readerium wrote: post #82
2001zhaozhao wrote: post #43

There's a tradeoff between dense models and MoEs on memory usage vs. compute for the same quality. For example, Qwen3.5 27B and Qwen3.5 122B A10B have similar average performance across benchmarks. The 122B is much faster to run than the 27B (generates more tokens at the same compute). The 27B, on the other hand, uses ~4x less VRAM at low context lengths (less difference at high context lengths). Right now, different…

LLMs are memory bandwidth bound not compute bound.

This is incorrect, prompt processing is compute bound.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#89

Post by otherme123 »

driverdan wrote: post #61
marshray wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about LLMs, but I tried an Intel card when Ubuntu Wayland couldn't initialize a 2 year old Nvidia. It just works.

Interesting. I had read that Intel's Linux drivers were far behind their Windows versions. I haven't checked in a few months though.

That is compatible with what the comment you are replying: you don't need much to beat nVidia open drivers for linux. Intel linux drivers might be behind their Windows drivers, still ahead of nVidia's.

nVidia has zero incentives to play open for linux, they release the binary blobs, next to zero docs and support, and you deal with it. The last nVidia card I bought was 20 years ago, and it was so bad for linux (low perf and freezes for the open drivers, manual re-install hell and pray on each kernel update for the binaries) that I switched to ATI. Since then, ATI or Intel always were decent with zero headaches.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

#90

Post by cubefox »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #62
phonon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's coming out in https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-crescent-island by around the end of the year.

Another comment here claims Celestial is cancelled. Has Intel indicated their intentions for the consumer dGPU space?

There are only rumours apparently: https://www.club386.com/intel-arc-celestial-cancelled-leak/
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