11 ms·

Intel's Battlemage Architecture

212 points by ksec 2y ago

treve 2y ago
I wonder if these GPUs are good options for Linux rigs and if first-party drivers are made.
- baq 2y ago
  Of all the god awful Linux GPU drivers Intel's are the least awful IME. Unless you're talking purely compute, then nvidia, have fun matching those cuda versions though...
  - dralley 2y ago
    AMD's Linux drivers are pretty good. I get better performance playing games through Proton on Linux than I do playing the same games on Windows, despite whatever overhead the translation adds. The only really annoying bug I've run into is the one where the system locks up if you go to sleep with more used swap space than free memory, but that one just got fixed.
- bradfa 2y ago
  Yes, first party drivers are made. Upstream Linux and mesa project should have good support in their latest releases. If you're running a non-bleeding edge distro, you may need to wait or do a little leg work to get the newer versions of things, but this is not unusual for new hardware. If you're running Ubuntu, Intel has some exact steps you can follow: https://dgpu-docs.intel.com/driver/client/overview.html https://dgpu-docs.intel.com/driver/client/overview.html
- ThaDood 2y ago
  Here are some benchmarks from a few months back. Seems promising. https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-gpu-compute https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-gpu-compute Whoops - included the wrong link! https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-graphics-linux https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-graphics-linu...
- ZeWaka 2y ago
  I use an Alchemist series A380 on my nix media server, but it's absolutely fantastic for video encoding.
  - VTimofeenko 2y ago
    Same; recently built SFF with low profile A310. Goes through video streams like hot knife through butter. Do you have your config posted somewhere? I'd be interested to compare notes
    - ZeWaka 2y ago
      Not particularly, no. I mainly followed the Jellyfin setup (https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration/intel https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-ac...) and tweaked some things like fan speeds to my preferences. General linuxserver.io containers, and ITX.
      - VTimofeenko 2y ago
        Got it. I went native; NixOS wiki has an example of an overlay
- dingi 2y ago
  In fact, Intel has been a stellar contributor to the Linux kernel and associated projects, compared to all other vendors. They usually have launch day Linux support provided that you are running a bleeding edge Linux kernel.
- everfrustrated 2y ago
  Intel also have up-streamed their video encoding acceleration support into software like ffmpeg. Intel Arc gpus also support hardware video encoding for the AV1 codec which even the just released Nvidia 50 series still doesn't support.
  - lostmsu 2y ago
    This is wrong. AV1 encoding is supported since Nvidia 40 series.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  I have always associated Intel iGPUs with good drivers but people seem to often complain about their Linux dGPU drivers in these threads. I hope it is just an issue of them trying to break into a new field, rather than a slipping of their GPU drivers in general…
  - jorvi 2y ago
    Intel switched over to a new driver for dGPUs and any iGPU newer than Skylake(?). The newest beta-ish driver is Xe, the main driver is Intel HD, and the old driver is i915. People complaining experienced the teething issues of early Xe builds.
    - sirn 2y ago
      i915 is still the main kernel mode driver on Linux for every Intel GPUs up to Alchemist. xe kmd is used by Battlemage by default (as of 6.12). There's a Mesa DRI driver, called i965 (originally made for Broadwater chipset, thus the 965 numbering), which has since been replaced by either: - Crocus for anything up to Broadwell (Gen 8) - Iris for anything from Broadwell and newer Then there's a Video Acceleration driver, which is (also) called i965. I think this is what you're referring to. There are: - i965 (aka Intel VAAPI Driver), which supports anything from Westmere (Gen 5) to Coffee Lake (Gen 9.5) - iHD (aka Intel Media Driver), is a newer one, which supports anything from Broadwell (Gen 8) - libvpl, an even newer one, which supports anything from Tiger Lake (Gen 12) and up Battlemage users had to use libvpl until recently because Media Driver 2024Q4 with BMG support was only released 2 weeks ago. Using libvpl with ffmpeg may requires rebuilding ffmpeg, as some distro doesn't have it enabled (due to conflict with legacy Intel Media SDK, so you have to choose). I have B580 for my Linux machine (6.12), and xe seems pretty stable/performant so far.
      - nullify88 2y ago
        I am always confused about which drivers need installing to fully enable all hardware acceleration features on Broadwell. Also not all distros maintain the drivers equally resulting in mismatches between the vaapi driver or some other driver.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 2y ago
  Been running Linux on the A770 for about 2 years now. Very happy with the driver situation. Was a bit rough very early on, but it's nice and stable now. Recommend at least Linux 6.4, but preferably newer. I use a rolling release distro(Artix) to get up to date kernels. ML stuff can be a pain sometimes because support in pytorch and various other libraries is not as prioritised as CUDA. But I've been able to get llama.cpp working via ollama, which has experimental intel gpu support. Worked fine when I tested it, though I haven't actually used it very much, so don't quote me on it. For image gen, your best bet is to use sdnext(https://github.com/vladmandic/sdnext https://github.com/vladmandic/sdnext), which supports Intel on linux officially, and will automagically install the right pytorch version, and do a bunch of trickery to get libraries that insist on CUDA to work in many of the cases. Though some things are still unsupported due to various libraries still not supporting intel on Linux. Some types of quantization are unavailable for instance. But at least if you have the A770, quantisation for image gen is not as important due to plentyful VRAM, unless you're trying to use the flux models.
  - immibis 2y ago
    I also have an A770. Don't use it for AI, but it runs fine for general 3D use (which mostly means either Minecraft, other similarly casual games, or demoscene shaders). I'm pretty sure I'm not utilizing it fully most of the time. My main complaint is that the fan control just doesn't work. They stay at low speed or off no matter how hot the card gets, until it shuts down due to overheating. Apparently there's a firmware update to fix this, but you need Windows to flash it. You can zip-tie a spare fan somewhere pointing at the card... Secondary complaint is that it's somehow not compatible with Linux's early boot console, so there's no graphical output until the driver is loaded. You'd better have ssh enabled while setting it up. It's also incompatible with MBR/BIOS boot since it doesn't include an option ROM or whatever is needed to make that work - so I switched to UEFI (which I thought I was already using). When I ran a shader "competition" some people's code with undefined behaviour ran differently on my GPU than theirs. That's unavoidable regardless of brand and not an Intel thing at all.
- jcarrano 2y ago
  Last year I was doing a livestream for a band. The NVidia encoder on my friend's computer (running Windows) just wouldn't work. We tried in vain to install drivers and random stuff from Nvidia. I pulled out my own machine with Linux and Intel iGPU and not only did it worked flawlessly, but did so on battery and with charge to spare. On the other hand, I have to keep the driver for the secondary GPU (also intel) blacklisted because last time I tried to use it it was constantly drawing power.
netbioserror 2y ago
A lot of commentators have pointed out that Intel is reaching nowhere near the performance/mm2 of Nvidia or AMD designs, though contrary to what I thought that might imply, it seems that power consumption is very much under control on Battlemage. So it seems the primary trade-off here is on the die cost. Can anyone explain what might be going on here, especially as it relates to power consumption? I thought (bigger die ^ bigger wires -> more current -> higher consumption).
- tonetegeatinst 2y ago
  It mainly seems to boil down to design choice and process technology. They might be targeting a lower power density per squad mm than compared to amd or nvidia, focusing more on lower power levels. Instruction set architecture and layout of the chips and PCB also factor into this as well.
- MisterTea 2y ago
  > I thought (bigger die ^ bigger wires -> more current -> higher consumption). I am not a semi expert but bigger die doesn't mean bigger wires if you are referring to cross-section, the wires would be thinner meaning less current. Power is consumed pushing and pulling electrons from the transistor gates which are all of the FET type, field effect transistor. The gate is a capacitor that needs to be charged to open the gate to allow current to flow through the transistor. discharging the gate closes it. That current draw then gets multiplied by a few billion gates so you can see where the load comes from.
  - williamDafoe 2y ago
    Actually the wires don't scale down like the transistors do. I remember in graduate school taking VLSI circuit complexity theory and the conclusion was for two dimensional circuits the wires will end Moore's Law. However I've seen articles about backside power delivery and they are already using seven+ layers so the wires are going through three dimensions now. Copper interconnects were a one-time bonus in the late 90s and after that wires just don't scale down-signal delay would go up too fast. Imagine taking a city with all the streets and houses and the houses now become the size of dog houses but you can't shrink the streets they have to stay the same size to carry signals quickly!
stoatstudios 2y ago
Is nobody going talk about how the architecture is called "Battlemage?" Is that just normal to GPU enthusiasts?
- ZeWaka 2y ago
  It's their 2nd generation, the 'B' series. The previous was their 'A' / Alchemist. > According to Intel, the brand is named after the concept of story arcs found in video games. Each generation of Arc is named after character classes sorted by each letter of the Latin alphabet in ascending order. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Arc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Arc)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- reginald78 2y ago
  The generations are all fantasy type names in alphabetical order. The first was Alchemist (and the cards were things like A310) and the next is Celestial. Actually when I think about product names for GPUs and CPUs these seem above average in clarity and only slightly dorkier than average. I'm sure they'll get more confusing and nonsensical with time as that seems to be a constant of the universe.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    Can't wait for Dungeon architecture.
    - meragrin_ 2y ago
      Dungeon architecture? What's that?
      - sevg 2y ago
        Looks to have been a joke about the alphabetical naming: Alchemist, Battlemage, Celestial .. Dungeon (There’s no name decided yet for the fourth in the series.)
jorvi 2y ago
> Unfortunately, today’s midrange cards like the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 only come with 8 GB of VRAM Just a nit: one step up (RX 7600 XT) comes with 16GB memory, although in clamshell configuration. With the B580 falling inbetween the 7600 and 7600 XT in terms of pricing, it seems a bit unfair to only compare it with the former. - RX 7600 (8GB) ~€300 - RTX 4060 (8GB) ~€310 - Intel B580 (12GB) ~€330 - RX 7600 XT (16GB) ~€350 - RTX 4060 Ti (8GB) ~€420 - RTX 4060 Ti (16GB) ~€580* *Apparently this card is really rare plus a bad value proposition, so it is hard to find
- mananaysiempre 2y ago
  All sources I've seen say the 4060 Ti 8GB is also really bad value. Here’s GamersNexus for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2b0MWGwK_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2b0MWGwK_U.
  - jandrese 2y ago
    And that is also one of the most popular cards on prebuilt systems. Just search through Amazon listings and see which card shows up all the damn time.
    - kbolino 2y ago
      Prebuilders get priority access and volume discounts, so while it may not be a good value to buy individually, that doesn't necessarily apply to buying it in bulk.
- hassleblad23 2y ago
  > Intel takes advantage of this by launching the Arc B580 at $250, undercutting both competitors while offering 12 GB of VRAM. Not sure where you got that 350 EUR number for B580?
  - xmodem 2y ago
    330 EUR is roughly reflective of the street price of the B580 in Europe. For example: https://www.mindfactory.de/product_info.php/12GB-ASRock-Intel-ARC-B580-Challenger-12GO-Intel-VGA-Card_1604523.html https://www.mindfactory.de/product_info.php/12GB-ASRock-Inte... (~327 EUR) https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sparkle-intel-arc-b580-guardian-12gb-gddr6-graphics-card-gra-spk-03945.html https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sparkle-intel-arc-b580-guardi... (~330 EUR) https://www.inet.se/produkt/5414587/acer-arc-b580-12gb-nitro-oc https://www.inet.se/produkt/5414587/acer-arc-b580-12gb-nitro... (~336 EUR)
glitchc 2y ago
Double the memory for double the price and I would buy one in a heartbeat.
- talldayo 2y ago
  If your application is video transcoding or AI inference, you could probably buy two and use them in a multi-GPU configuration.
  - glitchc 2y ago
    Hate futzing around with multi-GPU configurations. It's always a bit of a mess from a driver perspective, not to mention all the extra power connectors needed, even though this card only requires two.
- kevincox 2y ago
  There are a tons of products that I would buy if I could double a single spec for the same price.
taurknaut 2y ago
I don't really care about how it performs so long as it's better than a CPU. I just want to target the GPU myself and remove the vendor from the software equation. Nvidia has taught me there isn't any value that can't be destroyed with sufficiently bad drivers.
williamDafoe 2y ago
[flagged]
- ksec 2y ago
  > I am not too impressed with the "chips and cheese ant's view article" as they don't uncover the reason why performance is SO PATHETIC! Performance on GPU has always been about Drivers. Chip and Cheese is only here to show the uArch behind it. This isn't even new as we should have learned all about it during Voodoo 3Dfx era. And 9 years have passed since an ( now retired ) Intel Engineers said that they would be completing against Nvidia by 2020 if not 2021. We are now in 2025 and they are not even close. But somehow Raja Koduri was suppose to save them and now gone.
  - rincebrain 2y ago
    Intel seems to have deep-seated issues with their PR department writing checks their engineers can't pay out on time for. Not that Intel engineers are bad - on the contrary. But as you pointed out, they've been promising they'd be further than they are now for over 5 years now, and even 10+ years ago when I was working in HPC systems, they kept promising things you should build your systems on that would be "in the next gen" that were not, in fact, there. It seems much like the Bioware Problem(tm) where Bioware got very comfortable promising the moon in 12 months and assuming 6 months of crunch would Magically produce a good outcome, and then discovered that Results May Vary.
- wqaatwt 2y ago
  > 4060 performance That’s really not true though. It’s closer to 4060 Ti and somewhat ahead/behind depending on specific game.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
  I think this is a bad take because it assumes that NVidia is making rapid price/performance improvements in the consumer space The RTX 4060 is roughly equivalent to a 2080 (similar performance and ram and transistors). Intel isn't making much margin, but from what I've seen they're probably roughly breaking even not taking a huge loss. Also, a ton of the work for Intel is in drivers which are (as the A770 showed) very improvable after launch. Based on the hardware, it seems very possible that B580 could get an extra 10% (especially in 1080p) which would bring it clear above the 4060ti in perf.
myrmidon 2y ago
Loosely related question: What prevents manufacturers from taking some existing mid/toprange consumer GPU design, and just slapping like 256GB VRAM onto it? (enabling consumers to run big-LLM inference locally). Would that be useless for some reason? What am I missing?
- patmorgan23 2y ago
  Because then they couldn't sell you the $10k enterprise GPU
  - RachelF 2y ago
    True, but it is mostly profit - GDDR6 sells for $2.30 a gigabyte [1] [1]https://www.dramexchange.com https://www.dramexchange.com
    - Tuna-Fish 2y ago
      That's for 8Gbit chips, which are more or less unusable in modern products. 16Gbit chips are at ~$8, or $4 per GB.
  - Culonavirus 2y ago
    10? Try 30+ ...
- ksec 2y ago
  Bandwidth. GDDR / HBM, both used by GPU depending on usage are high bandwidth low capacity, comparatively speaking. Modern GPU tries to put more VRAM with more memory channel up to 512bit but requires more die space and hence are expensive. We will need a new memory design for both GDDR and HBM. And I wont be surprised they are working on it already. But hardware takes time so it will be few more years down the road.
- reginald78 2y ago
  You'd need memory chips with double the memory capacity to slap the extra vram in, at least without altering the memory bus width. And indeed, some third party modded entries like that seem to have shown up: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-gaming-gpus-modded-with-2x-vram-for-ai-workloads https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-gamin... As far as official products, I think the real reason another commentator mentioned is that they don't want to cannibalize their more powerful card sales. I know I'd be interested in a lower powered card with a lot of vram just to get my foot in the door, that is why I bought a RTX 3060 12GB which is unimpressive for gaming but actually had the second most vram available in that generation. Nvidia seem to have noticed this mistake and later released a crappier 8GB version to replace it. I think if the market reacted to create a product like this to compete with nvidia they'd pretty quickly release something to fit the need, but as it is they don't have too.
joelthelion 2y ago
That's cool and all but can you use it for deep learning?
- coderenegade 2y ago
  You can. You need a recent Linux kernel, but pytorch now officially supports Intel's extensions (xpu). These are actually a decent consumer proposition because the bottleneck for most people training models on their own hardware is VRAM. These have substantially more VRAM than anything in their price bracket, and are priced competitively enough that you could buy two and have a pretty solid training setup. Or one for training and one for inference.
  - joelthelion 2y ago
    Very interesting, thank you!
SG- 2y ago
it's a nice technical article but the charts are just terrible and seem blurry even when zoomed in.
- clamchowder 2y ago
  Yea Wordpress was a terrible platform and Substack is also a terrible platform. I don't know why every platform wants to take a simple uploaded PNG and apply TAA to it. And don't get me started on how Substack has no native table support, when HTML had it since prehistoric times. If I had more time I'd roll my own site with basic HTML/CSS. It's not even hard, just time consuming.
  - dark__paladin 2y ago
    TAA is temporal anti-aliasing, correct? There is no time dimension here, isn't it just compression + bilinear filtering?
    - clamchowder 2y ago
      It was a joke about blurriness. To extend the joke, be glad it doesn't flicker and shimmer. But yes, platforms usually apply compression in terrible ways, and it's especially noticeable coming from text and straight line stuff like graphs
      - dark__paladin 2y ago
        Thanks for clarifying, went right over my head!
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - singhrac 2y ago
    Ghost as an alternative? They’ll let you sign up paying subscribers as well.
daneel_w 2y ago
Missing detail: 190 watt TDP.
singhrac 2y ago
There's some rumors of an Arc Pro, which would be a B580 in clamshell configuration with 24 GB of VRAM (which iiuc would be the same memory bandwidth unfortunately). Unless the price is absurd it would be the cheapest dollar/VRAM card at 24 GB.
- mrandish 2y ago
  That would be nice for AI-curious users and hobby experimenters, however gamers won't find near-term value in VRAM beyond 16GB. My concern is that due to Intel's severe financial challenges, their CEO du jour will end up killing off the discrete GPU business. Back when they (finally) got into dGPUs seriously, Intel (and everyone else) said it would take many years and the patience to tolerate break-even products and losses while coming up the learning curve. Currently, it looks pretty much impossible to sustain ongoing profitability in low-end GPUs. Given gamer's current performance expectations vs the manufacturing costs to hit those targets, mid-range GPUs ($500-$750) seem like the minimum to have broad enough appeal to be sustainably profitable. Unfortunately, Intel is still probably years away from a competitive mid-range product. Sadly, the market has evolved weirdly such that there's now a minimum performance threshold preventing scaling price/performance down linearly below $300. The problem for Intel is they waited too long to enter the dGPU race, so now this profit gap coincides with no longer having the excess CPU profits to go in the red for years. Instead they squandered billions doing stupid stuff like buying McAfee.
ein0p 2y ago
Why not go out on a limb and produce a 64GB compute-optimized card with 1TB/sec memory bandwidth, Intel? What do you have to lose at this point?
rajnathani 2y ago
Slightly tangential: Nvidia has over 22.5K patents: https://patents.google.com/?assignee=Nvidia+Corporation https://patents.google.com/?assignee=Nvidia+Corporation
- cedws 2y ago
  I really don’t see the argument for patents. It just slows down healthy competition in Western countries while China disregards them and surges ahead. How can we expect to compete when they don’t play by the same rules?
MezzoDelCammin 2y ago
This would have been a great card for a homelab if only they haven't decided to move away from SR-IOV in their consumer GPUs. AFAIK it used to be possible to get some SR-IOV working on the previous Alchemists (with some flashing), but Battlemage seems like a proof of Intel abandoning the virtualization/GPU splitting in the consumer space altogether.

212 points by ksec 2y ago

treve 2y ago

I wonder if these GPUs are good options for Linux rigs and if first-party drivers are made.

baq 2y ago
Of all the god awful Linux GPU drivers Intel's are the least awful IME. Unless you're talking purely compute, then nvidia, have fun matching those cuda versions though...
- dralley 2y ago
  AMD's Linux drivers are pretty good. I get better performance playing games through Proton on Linux than I do playing the same games on Windows, despite whatever overhead the translation adds. The only really annoying bug I've run into is the one where the system locks up if you go to sleep with more used swap space than free memory, but that one just got fixed.
bradfa 2y ago
Yes, first party drivers are made. Upstream Linux and mesa project should have good support in their latest releases. If you're running a non-bleeding edge distro, you may need to wait or do a little leg work to get the newer versions of things, but this is not unusual for new hardware. If you're running Ubuntu, Intel has some exact steps you can follow: https://dgpu-docs.intel.com/driver/client/overview.html https://dgpu-docs.intel.com/driver/client/overview.html
ThaDood 2y ago
Here are some benchmarks from a few months back. Seems promising. https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-gpu-compute https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-gpu-compute Whoops - included the wrong link! https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-graphics-linux https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-graphics-linu...
ZeWaka 2y ago
I use an Alchemist series A380 on my nix media server, but it's absolutely fantastic for video encoding.
- VTimofeenko 2y ago
  Same; recently built SFF with low profile A310. Goes through video streams like hot knife through butter. Do you have your config posted somewhere? I'd be interested to compare notes
  - ZeWaka 2y ago
    Not particularly, no. I mainly followed the Jellyfin setup (https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration/intel https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-ac...) and tweaked some things like fan speeds to my preferences. General linuxserver.io containers, and ITX.
    - VTimofeenko 2y ago
      Got it. I went native; NixOS wiki has an example of an overlay
dingi 2y ago
In fact, Intel has been a stellar contributor to the Linux kernel and associated projects, compared to all other vendors. They usually have launch day Linux support provided that you are running a bleeding edge Linux kernel.
everfrustrated 2y ago
Intel also have up-streamed their video encoding acceleration support into software like ffmpeg. Intel Arc gpus also support hardware video encoding for the AV1 codec which even the just released Nvidia 50 series still doesn't support.
- lostmsu 2y ago
  This is wrong. AV1 encoding is supported since Nvidia 40 series.
bee_rider 2y ago
I have always associated Intel iGPUs with good drivers but people seem to often complain about their Linux dGPU drivers in these threads. I hope it is just an issue of them trying to break into a new field, rather than a slipping of their GPU drivers in general…
- jorvi 2y ago
  Intel switched over to a new driver for dGPUs and any iGPU newer than Skylake(?). The newest beta-ish driver is Xe, the main driver is Intel HD, and the old driver is i915. People complaining experienced the teething issues of early Xe builds.
  - sirn 2y ago
    i915 is still the main kernel mode driver on Linux for every Intel GPUs up to Alchemist. xe kmd is used by Battlemage by default (as of 6.12). There's a Mesa DRI driver, called i965 (originally made for Broadwater chipset, thus the 965 numbering), which has since been replaced by either: - Crocus for anything up to Broadwell (Gen 8) - Iris for anything from Broadwell and newer Then there's a Video Acceleration driver, which is (also) called i965. I think this is what you're referring to. There are: - i965 (aka Intel VAAPI Driver), which supports anything from Westmere (Gen 5) to Coffee Lake (Gen 9.5) - iHD (aka Intel Media Driver), is a newer one, which supports anything from Broadwell (Gen 8) - libvpl, an even newer one, which supports anything from Tiger Lake (Gen 12) and up Battlemage users had to use libvpl until recently because Media Driver 2024Q4 with BMG support was only released 2 weeks ago. Using libvpl with ffmpeg may requires rebuilding ffmpeg, as some distro doesn't have it enabled (due to conflict with legacy Intel Media SDK, so you have to choose). I have B580 for my Linux machine (6.12), and xe seems pretty stable/performant so far.
    - nullify88 2y ago
      I am always confused about which drivers need installing to fully enable all hardware acceleration features on Broadwell. Also not all distros maintain the drivers equally resulting in mismatches between the vaapi driver or some other driver.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 2y ago
Been running Linux on the A770 for about 2 years now. Very happy with the driver situation. Was a bit rough very early on, but it's nice and stable now. Recommend at least Linux 6.4, but preferably newer. I use a rolling release distro(Artix) to get up to date kernels. ML stuff can be a pain sometimes because support in pytorch and various other libraries is not as prioritised as CUDA. But I've been able to get llama.cpp working via ollama, which has experimental intel gpu support. Worked fine when I tested it, though I haven't actually used it very much, so don't quote me on it. For image gen, your best bet is to use sdnext(https://github.com/vladmandic/sdnext https://github.com/vladmandic/sdnext), which supports Intel on linux officially, and will automagically install the right pytorch version, and do a bunch of trickery to get libraries that insist on CUDA to work in many of the cases. Though some things are still unsupported due to various libraries still not supporting intel on Linux. Some types of quantization are unavailable for instance. But at least if you have the A770, quantisation for image gen is not as important due to plentyful VRAM, unless you're trying to use the flux models.
- immibis 2y ago
  I also have an A770. Don't use it for AI, but it runs fine for general 3D use (which mostly means either Minecraft, other similarly casual games, or demoscene shaders). I'm pretty sure I'm not utilizing it fully most of the time. My main complaint is that the fan control just doesn't work. They stay at low speed or off no matter how hot the card gets, until it shuts down due to overheating. Apparently there's a firmware update to fix this, but you need Windows to flash it. You can zip-tie a spare fan somewhere pointing at the card... Secondary complaint is that it's somehow not compatible with Linux's early boot console, so there's no graphical output until the driver is loaded. You'd better have ssh enabled while setting it up. It's also incompatible with MBR/BIOS boot since it doesn't include an option ROM or whatever is needed to make that work - so I switched to UEFI (which I thought I was already using). When I ran a shader "competition" some people's code with undefined behaviour ran differently on my GPU than theirs. That's unavoidable regardless of brand and not an Intel thing at all.
jcarrano 2y ago
Last year I was doing a livestream for a band. The NVidia encoder on my friend's computer (running Windows) just wouldn't work. We tried in vain to install drivers and random stuff from Nvidia. I pulled out my own machine with Linux and Intel iGPU and not only did it worked flawlessly, but did so on battery and with charge to spare. On the other hand, I have to keep the driver for the secondary GPU (also intel) blacklisted because last time I tried to use it it was constantly drawing power.

netbioserror 2y ago

A lot of commentators have pointed out that Intel is reaching nowhere near the performance/mm2 of Nvidia or AMD designs, though contrary to what I thought that might imply, it seems that power consumption is very much under control on Battlemage. So it seems the primary trade-off here is on the die cost. Can anyone explain what might be going on here, especially as it relates to power consumption? I thought (bigger die ^ bigger wires -> more current -> higher consumption).

tonetegeatinst 2y ago
It mainly seems to boil down to design choice and process technology. They might be targeting a lower power density per squad mm than compared to amd or nvidia, focusing more on lower power levels. Instruction set architecture and layout of the chips and PCB also factor into this as well.
MisterTea 2y ago
> I thought (bigger die ^ bigger wires -> more current -> higher consumption). I am not a semi expert but bigger die doesn't mean bigger wires if you are referring to cross-section, the wires would be thinner meaning less current. Power is consumed pushing and pulling electrons from the transistor gates which are all of the FET type, field effect transistor. The gate is a capacitor that needs to be charged to open the gate to allow current to flow through the transistor. discharging the gate closes it. That current draw then gets multiplied by a few billion gates so you can see where the load comes from.
- williamDafoe 2y ago
  Actually the wires don't scale down like the transistors do. I remember in graduate school taking VLSI circuit complexity theory and the conclusion was for two dimensional circuits the wires will end Moore's Law. However I've seen articles about backside power delivery and they are already using seven+ layers so the wires are going through three dimensions now. Copper interconnects were a one-time bonus in the late 90s and after that wires just don't scale down-signal delay would go up too fast. Imagine taking a city with all the streets and houses and the houses now become the size of dog houses but you can't shrink the streets they have to stay the same size to carry signals quickly!

stoatstudios 2y ago

Is nobody going talk about how the architecture is called "Battlemage?" Is that just normal to GPU enthusiasts?

ZeWaka 2y ago
It's their 2nd generation, the 'B' series. The previous was their 'A' / Alchemist. > According to Intel, the brand is named after the concept of story arcs found in video games. Each generation of Arc is named after character classes sorted by each letter of the Latin alphabet in ascending order. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Arc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Arc)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
reginald78 2y ago
The generations are all fantasy type names in alphabetical order. The first was Alchemist (and the cards were things like A310) and the next is Celestial. Actually when I think about product names for GPUs and CPUs these seem above average in clarity and only slightly dorkier than average. I'm sure they'll get more confusing and nonsensical with time as that seems to be a constant of the universe.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Can't wait for Dungeon architecture.
  - meragrin_ 2y ago
    Dungeon architecture? What's that?
    - sevg 2y ago
      Looks to have been a joke about the alphabetical naming: Alchemist, Battlemage, Celestial .. Dungeon (There’s no name decided yet for the fourth in the series.)

jorvi 2y ago

> Unfortunately, today’s midrange cards like the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 only come with 8 GB of VRAM Just a nit: one step up (RX 7600 XT) comes with 16GB memory, although in clamshell configuration. With the B580 falling inbetween the 7600 and 7600 XT in terms of pricing, it seems a bit unfair to only compare it with the former. - RX 7600 (8GB) ~€300 - RTX 4060 (8GB) ~€310 - Intel B580 (12GB) ~€330 - RX 7600 XT (16GB) ~€350 - RTX 4060 Ti (8GB) ~€420 - RTX 4060 Ti (16GB) ~€580* *Apparently this card is really rare plus a bad value proposition, so it is hard to find

mananaysiempre 2y ago
All sources I've seen say the 4060 Ti 8GB is also really bad value. Here’s GamersNexus for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2b0MWGwK_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2b0MWGwK_U.
- jandrese 2y ago
  And that is also one of the most popular cards on prebuilt systems. Just search through Amazon listings and see which card shows up all the damn time.
  - kbolino 2y ago
    Prebuilders get priority access and volume discounts, so while it may not be a good value to buy individually, that doesn't necessarily apply to buying it in bulk.
hassleblad23 2y ago
> Intel takes advantage of this by launching the Arc B580 at $250, undercutting both competitors while offering 12 GB of VRAM. Not sure where you got that 350 EUR number for B580?
- xmodem 2y ago
  330 EUR is roughly reflective of the street price of the B580 in Europe. For example: https://www.mindfactory.de/product_info.php/12GB-ASRock-Intel-ARC-B580-Challenger-12GO-Intel-VGA-Card_1604523.html https://www.mindfactory.de/product_info.php/12GB-ASRock-Inte... (~327 EUR) https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sparkle-intel-arc-b580-guardian-12gb-gddr6-graphics-card-gra-spk-03945.html https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sparkle-intel-arc-b580-guardi... (~330 EUR) https://www.inet.se/produkt/5414587/acer-arc-b580-12gb-nitro-oc https://www.inet.se/produkt/5414587/acer-arc-b580-12gb-nitro... (~336 EUR)

glitchc 2y ago

Double the memory for double the price and I would buy one in a heartbeat.

talldayo 2y ago
If your application is video transcoding or AI inference, you could probably buy two and use them in a multi-GPU configuration.
- glitchc 2y ago
  Hate futzing around with multi-GPU configurations. It's always a bit of a mess from a driver perspective, not to mention all the extra power connectors needed, even though this card only requires two.
kevincox 2y ago
There are a tons of products that I would buy if I could double a single spec for the same price.

taurknaut 2y ago

I don't really care about how it performs so long as it's better than a CPU. I just want to target the GPU myself and remove the vendor from the software equation. Nvidia has taught me there isn't any value that can't be destroyed with sufficiently bad drivers.

williamDafoe 2y ago

[flagged]

ksec 2y ago
> I am not too impressed with the "chips and cheese ant's view article" as they don't uncover the reason why performance is SO PATHETIC! Performance on GPU has always been about Drivers. Chip and Cheese is only here to show the uArch behind it. This isn't even new as we should have learned all about it during Voodoo 3Dfx era. And 9 years have passed since an ( now retired ) Intel Engineers said that they would be completing against Nvidia by 2020 if not 2021. We are now in 2025 and they are not even close. But somehow Raja Koduri was suppose to save them and now gone.
- rincebrain 2y ago
  Intel seems to have deep-seated issues with their PR department writing checks their engineers can't pay out on time for. Not that Intel engineers are bad - on the contrary. But as you pointed out, they've been promising they'd be further than they are now for over 5 years now, and even 10+ years ago when I was working in HPC systems, they kept promising things you should build your systems on that would be "in the next gen" that were not, in fact, there. It seems much like the Bioware Problem(tm) where Bioware got very comfortable promising the moon in 12 months and assuming 6 months of crunch would Magically produce a good outcome, and then discovered that Results May Vary.
wqaatwt 2y ago
> 4060 performance That’s really not true though. It’s closer to 4060 Ti and somewhat ahead/behind depending on specific game.
adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
I think this is a bad take because it assumes that NVidia is making rapid price/performance improvements in the consumer space The RTX 4060 is roughly equivalent to a 2080 (similar performance and ram and transistors). Intel isn't making much margin, but from what I've seen they're probably roughly breaking even not taking a huge loss. Also, a ton of the work for Intel is in drivers which are (as the A770 showed) very improvable after launch. Based on the hardware, it seems very possible that B580 could get an extra 10% (especially in 1080p) which would bring it clear above the 4060ti in perf.

myrmidon 2y ago

Loosely related question: What prevents manufacturers from taking some existing mid/toprange consumer GPU design, and just slapping like 256GB VRAM onto it? (enabling consumers to run big-LLM inference locally). Would that be useless for some reason? What am I missing?

patmorgan23 2y ago
Because then they couldn't sell you the $10k enterprise GPU
- RachelF 2y ago
  True, but it is mostly profit - GDDR6 sells for $2.30 a gigabyte [1] [1]https://www.dramexchange.com https://www.dramexchange.com
  - Tuna-Fish 2y ago
    That's for 8Gbit chips, which are more or less unusable in modern products. 16Gbit chips are at ~$8, or $4 per GB.
- Culonavirus 2y ago
  10? Try 30+ ...
ksec 2y ago
Bandwidth. GDDR / HBM, both used by GPU depending on usage are high bandwidth low capacity, comparatively speaking. Modern GPU tries to put more VRAM with more memory channel up to 512bit but requires more die space and hence are expensive. We will need a new memory design for both GDDR and HBM. And I wont be surprised they are working on it already. But hardware takes time so it will be few more years down the road.
reginald78 2y ago
You'd need memory chips with double the memory capacity to slap the extra vram in, at least without altering the memory bus width. And indeed, some third party modded entries like that seem to have shown up: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-gaming-gpus-modded-with-2x-vram-for-ai-workloads https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-gamin... As far as official products, I think the real reason another commentator mentioned is that they don't want to cannibalize their more powerful card sales. I know I'd be interested in a lower powered card with a lot of vram just to get my foot in the door, that is why I bought a RTX 3060 12GB which is unimpressive for gaming but actually had the second most vram available in that generation. Nvidia seem to have noticed this mistake and later released a crappier 8GB version to replace it. I think if the market reacted to create a product like this to compete with nvidia they'd pretty quickly release something to fit the need, but as it is they don't have too.

joelthelion 2y ago

That's cool and all but can you use it for deep learning?

coderenegade 2y ago
You can. You need a recent Linux kernel, but pytorch now officially supports Intel's extensions (xpu). These are actually a decent consumer proposition because the bottleneck for most people training models on their own hardware is VRAM. These have substantially more VRAM than anything in their price bracket, and are priced competitively enough that you could buy two and have a pretty solid training setup. Or one for training and one for inference.
- joelthelion 2y ago
  Very interesting, thank you!

SG- 2y ago

it's a nice technical article but the charts are just terrible and seem blurry even when zoomed in.

clamchowder 2y ago
Yea Wordpress was a terrible platform and Substack is also a terrible platform. I don't know why every platform wants to take a simple uploaded PNG and apply TAA to it. And don't get me started on how Substack has no native table support, when HTML had it since prehistoric times. If I had more time I'd roll my own site with basic HTML/CSS. It's not even hard, just time consuming.
- dark__paladin 2y ago
  TAA is temporal anti-aliasing, correct? There is no time dimension here, isn't it just compression + bilinear filtering?
  - clamchowder 2y ago
    It was a joke about blurriness. To extend the joke, be glad it doesn't flicker and shimmer. But yes, platforms usually apply compression in terrible ways, and it's especially noticeable coming from text and straight line stuff like graphs
    - dark__paladin 2y ago
      Thanks for clarifying, went right over my head!
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- singhrac 2y ago
  Ghost as an alternative? They’ll let you sign up paying subscribers as well.

daneel_w 2y ago

Missing detail: 190 watt TDP.

singhrac 2y ago

There's some rumors of an Arc Pro, which would be a B580 in clamshell configuration with 24 GB of VRAM (which iiuc would be the same memory bandwidth unfortunately). Unless the price is absurd it would be the cheapest dollar/VRAM card at 24 GB.

mrandish 2y ago
That would be nice for AI-curious users and hobby experimenters, however gamers won't find near-term value in VRAM beyond 16GB. My concern is that due to Intel's severe financial challenges, their CEO du jour will end up killing off the discrete GPU business. Back when they (finally) got into dGPUs seriously, Intel (and everyone else) said it would take many years and the patience to tolerate break-even products and losses while coming up the learning curve. Currently, it looks pretty much impossible to sustain ongoing profitability in low-end GPUs. Given gamer's current performance expectations vs the manufacturing costs to hit those targets, mid-range GPUs ($500-$750) seem like the minimum to have broad enough appeal to be sustainably profitable. Unfortunately, Intel is still probably years away from a competitive mid-range product. Sadly, the market has evolved weirdly such that there's now a minimum performance threshold preventing scaling price/performance down linearly below $300. The problem for Intel is they waited too long to enter the dGPU race, so now this profit gap coincides with no longer having the excess CPU profits to go in the red for years. Instead they squandered billions doing stupid stuff like buying McAfee.

ein0p 2y ago

Why not go out on a limb and produce a 64GB compute-optimized card with 1TB/sec memory bandwidth, Intel? What do you have to lose at this point?

rajnathani 2y ago

Slightly tangential: Nvidia has over 22.5K patents: https://patents.google.com/?assignee=Nvidia+Corporation https://patents.google.com/?assignee=Nvidia+Corporation

cedws 2y ago
I really don’t see the argument for patents. It just slows down healthy competition in Western countries while China disregards them and surges ahead. How can we expect to compete when they don’t play by the same rules?

MezzoDelCammin 2y ago

This would have been a great card for a homelab if only they haven't decided to move away from SR-IOV in their consumer GPUs. AFAIK it used to be possible to get some SR-IOV working on the previous Alchemists (with some flashing), but Battlemage seems like a proof of Intel abandoning the virtualization/GPU splitting in the consumer space altogether.