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Recent kernels have SR-IOV support for these chips too. B&H has them listed for $950.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1959142-REG/intel_33p...

When 32GB NVIDIA cards seem to start at around $4000 that's a big enough gap to be motivating for a bunch of applications.

I think the B65 is priced at $650. Both supported by llamacpp I believe. With that power draw you could run two of them.

I tend to agree that the vram size and bandwidth is the core thing, but this B70 Pro allegedly has 387 int8 tops vs a 5090 having 3400 int8 tops. 600 compares vs 1792GB/s. I'm delighted so see an option with quarter the price! But man, a tenth the performance? https://www.techpowerup.com/347721/sparkle-announces-intel-a... https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-annou...

Intel GPU prices have stayed fine, but I do wonder if they are viable for Inference if they will wind up like Nvidia GPUs, severely overpriced.

I mean it kind of is considering that's comparable to a 5070 which has 672 GB/s? Benefit of NVIDIA being the only one using GDDR7 for now I guess.

Most people doing local inference run the MoE layers on CPU anyway, because decode is not compute constrained and wasting the high-bandwidth VRAM on unused weights is silly. It's better to use it for longer context. Recent architectures even offload the MoE experts to fast (PCIe x4 5.0 or similar performance) NVMe: it's slow but it opens up running even SOTA local MoE models on ordinary hardware.

(VR enthusiast here, mostly under windows)

intel support has been mild to non existent in the VR space unfortunately. Given the very finicky latency + engine support i wouldn’t bet on a great experience, but hope for the best for more competition in this market. (even amd has a lot of caveats comparing to nvidia)

Footnotes:

* critical "as low as it can be" low latency support on intel XE is still not as mature as nvidia, amd was lagging behind until recently.

* Not sure about "multiprojection" rendering support on intel, lack of support can kill vr performance or make it incompatible. (the optimized vr games often rely on it)

They certainly look viable as replacements for my Tesla P40 for virtual workloads.

Running dual Pro B60 on Debian stable mostly for AI coding.

I was initially confused what packages were needed (backports kernel + ubuntu kobuk team ppa worksforme). After getting that right I'm now running vllm mostly without issues (though I don't run it 24/7).

At first had major issues with model quality but the vllm xpu guys fixed it fast.

Software capability not as good as nvidia yet (i.e. no fp8 kv cache support last I checked) but with this price difference I don't care. I can basically run a small fp8 local model with almost 100k token context and that's what I wanted.

Ive ran arc on fedora for years and for general desktop use it’s been perfect. For llm’s/coding it’s getting better but it’s rough around the edges. Had a bug where trying to get vram usage through pytorch would crash the system, ect.

Linus Torvalds runs ARC :)

Afaik driver support is very complete on Linux. You often see Arc GPUs used in media transcoding workloads for that reason.

My B580 works fine on Linux. Graphics perf is a bit worse than under Windows, but supposedly compute is pretty much the same.

There was the video a little while back where LTT built a computer for Linus Torvalds and they put an Intel Arc card inside, so I'd imagine Linux support is at the very least, acceptable.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA

I'm running A-series Arc for media transcoding and it works just fine.

https://newsroom.intel.com/artificial-intelligence/intel-to-...

Probably 160 GB for $4,000.

Buy Strix Halo or Apple Silicon platforms and you get essentially that.

Buy 4?

You are exaggerating, right? They didn't really fire the entire Arc team did they? I couldn't find a source saying that.

This is a chip they've had lying around for a while. It's the same architecture as used in the Arc B580 that launched at the end of 2024; this is just a slightly larger sibling. Intel clearly knew that their larger part wouldn't make for a competitive gaming GPU (hence the lack of a consumer counterpart to these cards), but must have decided that a relatively cheap workstation card with 32GB might be able to make some money.

I didn't know this. Have they officially given up on building discrete GPUs? Is this a last gasp of Arc to offload decent remaining architectures at a lower price than nvidia?

It is crazy to me that a world newly craving GPU architecture for AI, and gamers being largely neglected, that Intel would abandon an established product line.

My thinking is that I'd pick this, because I can't just plug a Mac into a slot in my server and have it easily integrate with all my other hardware across an ultra fast bus.

If they made an M4 on a card that supported all the same standards and was price competitive, though, that might be a good option.

Being able to keep infrastructure on Linux is a big advantage.

with those $2k you can have 2xB70, with 1.2Tb/sec and 64G Vram, on linux ( and you can scale further while mac prices increase are not linear 0

Support for Single Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV) to enable compute and Graphics workloads in virtualized environments.

Funny, I not sure why anyone would use Apple over Linux.

one can upgrade and swap parts with a computer running an Intel GPU. Linux is very well supported compared to Mac hardware.