Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

I wonder why everyone keep saying "just put more VRAM" yet no cards seem to do that. If it is that easy to compete with Nvidia, why don't we already have those cards?

No. The A1000 was well over $500 last year. This is the #3 player coming out with a card that's a better deal than what the #1 player currently has to offer.

I don't get why there's people trying to twist this story or come up with strawmen like the A2000 or even the RTX5000 series. Intel's coming into this market competitively, which as far as I know is a first, and it's also impressive.

Coming into the gaming GPU market had always been too ambitious a goal for Intel, they should have started with competing in the professional GPU market. It's well known that Nvidia and AMD have always been price gouging this market so it's fairly easy to enter it competitively.

If they can enter this market successfully and then work their way up on the food chain then that seems like good way to recover from their initial fiasco.

Well, no. It doesn't. The comparison is to the A1000.

Toss in a 5060 Ti into the compare table, and we're in an entirely different playing field.

There are reasons to buy the workstation NVidia cards over the consumer ones, but those mostly go away when looking at something like the new Intel. Unless one is in an exceptionally power-constrained environment, yet has room for a full-sized card (not SFF or laptop), I can't see a time the B50 would even be in the running against a 5060 Ti, 4060 Ti, or even 3060 Ti.

"release from a year and a half ago", that's technically true but a really generous assessment of the situation.

We could just as well compare it to the slightly more capable RTX A2000, which was released more than 4 years ago. Either way, Intel is competing with the EoL Ampere architecture.

... At a current day cheaper price.

There are huge markets that does not care about SOTA performance metrics but needs to get a job done.

> PS5 has something like 16GB unified RAM, and no game is going to really push much beyond that in VRAM use, we don’t really get Crysis style system crushers anymore.

This isn't really true from the recreational card side, nVidia themselves are reducing the number of 8GB models as a sign of market demand [1]. Games these days are regularly maxing out 6 & 8 GB when running anything above 1080p for 60fps.

The prevalence of Unreal Engine 5 also recently with a low quality of optimization for weaker hardware is causing games to be released basically unplayable for most.

For recreational use the sentiment is that 8GB is scraping the bottom of the requirements. Again this is partly due to bad optimizations, but games are being played in higher resolutions also, which required more memory for larger texture sizes.

[1] https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-reportedly-reduces-supply...

> PS5 has something like 16GB unified RAM, and no game is going to really push much beyond that in VRAM use

That's pretty funny considering that PC games are moving more towards 32GB RAM and 8GB+ VRAM. The next generation of consoles will of course increase to make room for higher quality assets.

Another use for high RAM GPUs is the simulation of turbulent flows for research. Compared to CPU, GPU Navier-Stokes solvers are super fast, but the size of the simulated domain is limited by the RAM.

>Because the market of people who want huge RAM GPUs for home AI tinkering is basically about 3 Hacker News posters

You're wrong. It's probably more like 9 HN posters.

Never underestimate bragging rights in gamers community. Majority of us run unoptimized systems with that one great piece of gear and as long as the game runs at decent FPS and we have some bragging rights it's all ok.

> I am not sure there is significant enough market for those.

How so? The prosumer local AI market is quite large and growing every day, and is much more lucrative per capita than the gamer market.

Gamers are an afterthought for GPU manufacturers. NVIDIA has been neglecting the segment for years, and is now much more focused on enterprise and AI workloads. Gamers get marginal performance bumps each generation, and side effect benefits from their AI R&D (DLSS, etc.). The exorbitant prices and performance per dollar are clear indications of this. It's plain extortion, and the worst part is that gamers accepted that paying $1000+ for a GPU is perfectly reasonable.

> This segment really does not need even 32GB, let alone 64GB or more.

4K is becoming a standard resolution, and 16GB is not enough for it. 24GB should be the minimum, and 32GB for some headroom. While it's true that 64GB is overkill for gaming, it would be nice if that would be accessible at reasonable prices. After all, GPUs are not exclusively for gaming, and we might want to run other workloads on them from time to time.

While I can imagine that VRAM manufacturing costs are much higher than DRAM costs, it's not unreasonable to conclude that NVIDIA, possibly in cahoots with AMD, has been artificially controlling the prices. While hardware has always become cheaper and more powerful over time, for some reason, GPUs buck that trend, and old GPUs somehow appreciate over time. Weird, huh. This can't be explained away as post-pandemic tax and chip shortages anymore.

Frankly, I would like some government body to investigate this industry, assuming they haven't been bought out yet. Label me a conspiracy theorist if you wish, but there is precedent for this behavior in many industries.

I think that's actually two GPUs on one card, and not a single GPU with 48GB VRAM

because then instead of RAM bandwidth now you're dealing with PCIe BW which is way less.

That only runs Mac OS so it's useless.

They sell the completed card, which has margin. You can charge more money for a card with more vram.

Even if they put out some super high memory models and just pass the ram through at cost it would increase sales -- potentially quite dramatically and increase their total income a lot and have a good chance of transitioning to being a market leader rather than an also-ran.

AMD has lagged so long because of the software ecosystem but the climate now is that they'd only need to support a couple popular model architectures to immediately grab a lot of business. The failure to do so is inexplicable.

I expect we will eventually learn that this was about yet another instance of anti-competitive collusion.

Regardless of what they say, they CAN compete in training and inference, there is literally no alternative to W7900 at the moment. That's 4080 performance with 48Gb VRAM for half of what similar CUDA devices would costs.

I’m interested in buying a GPU that costs less than a used car.

The problem is they can’t not attempt or they’ll simply die of irrelevance in a few years. GPUs will eat the world.

If NVidia gets complacent as Intel has become when they had the market share in the CPU space, there is opportunity for Intel, AMD and others in NVidias margin.

> Unfortunately unless US point guns at TSMC

They may not have to, frankly, depending on when China decides to move on Taiwan. It's useless to speculate—but it was certainly a hell of a gamble to open a SOTA (or close to it—4 nm is nothing to sneeze at) fab outside of the island.

Looks like Core Ultra is the only chip with integrated Arc GPU with AV1 encode. The Xeon series I was looking at, the 1700 socket so the e2400s, definitely don't have iGPU. (The fact that the motherboard I'm looking at only has VGA is probably a clue xD)

I'll have to consider pros and cons with Ultra chips, thanks for the tip.

What recent Xeon has the iGPU? Didn't they stop including them ~5 years ago?

I don't know how big the impact really is, but Intel is pretty far behind on encoder quality mostly. Oh wait, on most codecs they are pretty far behind, but av1 they seem pretty competitive? Neat.

Apologies for the video link. But a recent pretty in depth comparison: https://youtu.be/kkf7q4L5xl8

Thanks for that perspective. I am just in a place of puzzling why none of this says Made in USA on it. I can get socks and tshirts woven in north carolina which is nice, and furniture made in illinois. That's all a resurgence of 'arts & craft' I suppose, valuing a product made in small batches by someone passionate about quality instead of just getting whatever is lowest cost. Suppose there's not much in the way of artisan silicon yet :)

EDIT: I did think of, what is the closest thing to artisan silicon and thought of the POWER9 CPUs and found out those are made in USA Talos II is also manufactured in the US with the IBM POWER9 processors being fabbed in New York while the Raptor motherboard is manufactured in Texas along with where their systems are assembled.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/power9-threadripper-core9

the thing with iPhone production is not about producing iPhones per se, it's about providing a large volume customer for the supply chain below it - basic stuff like SMD resistors, capacitors, ICs, metal shields, frames, god knows what else - because you need that available domestically for weapons manufacturing, should China ever think of snacking Taiwan. But a potential military market in 10 years is not even close to "worth it" for any private investors or even the government to build out a domestic supply chain for that stuff.

"competing" means 12GB of VRAM at a 600ish price point though...

Why would you need a dedicated graphics card in a server? Usually you wouldn't even have a monitor connected.

I'd say that's a more recent development though because of how long it took for DisplayPort 2 products to make it to market. On both my RTX 4000 series GPU, and gaming 1440p240hz OLED monitor, HDMI 2.1 (~42 Gigabit) is the higher bandwidth port over its DisplayPort 1.4 (~26 Gigabit). So I use the HDMI ports. 26 Gigabit isn't enough for 1440p240z at 10-bit HDR colour. You can do it with DSC, but that comes with its own issues.

Only now are DisplayPort 2 monitors coming out

HDMI is still valuable for those of us who use KVMs. Cheap Display port KVMs don't have EDID emulation and expensive Display Port KVMs just don't work (in my experience).

This is the right answer. I see a bunch of people talking about licensing fees for HDMI, but when you’re plugging in 4 monitors it’s really nice to only use one type of cable. If you’re only using one type of cable, it’s gonna be DP.

You can also get GT730's with 4xHDMI - not fast, but great for office work and display/status boards type scenarios. Single slot passive design too, so you can stack several in a single PC. Currently just £63 UK each.

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASUS-GT730-4H-SL-2GD5-GeForce-multi...

Yeah, I recall even old Quadro cards in early Core era hardware often had quad mini DisplayPort.

As far as things I care about go, the HDMI Forum’s overt hostility[1] to open-source drivers is the important part, but it would indeed be interesting to know what Intel cared about there.

(Note that some self-described “open” standards are not royalty-free, only RAND-licensed by somebody’s definiton of “R” and “ND”. And some don’t have their text available free of charge, either, let alone have a development process open to all comers. I believe the only thing the phrase “open standard” reliably implies at this point is that access to the text does not require signing an NDA.

DisplayPort in particular is royalty-free—although of course with patents you can never really know—while legal access to the text is gated[2] behind a VESA membership with dues based on the company revenue—I can’t find the official formula, but Wikipedia claims $5k/yr minimum.)

[1] https://hackaday.com/2023/07/11/displayport-a-better-video-i...

[2] https://vesa.org/vesa-standards/

I'm not 100% sure but last time I looked it wasn't openly available anymore - it may still royalty free but when I tried to download the specification the site said you had to be a member of VESA now to download the standard (it is still possible to find earlier versions openly).

That's because DP sources can (and nearly always do) support encoding HDMI as a secondary mode, so all you need is a passive adapter. Going the other way requires active conversion.

I assume you have to pay HDMI royalties for DP ports which support the full HDMI spec, but older HDMI versions were supersets of DVI, so you can encode a basic HDMI compatible signal without stepping on their IP.

As long as the port supports it passively (called "DP++ Dual Mode"), if you have a DP-only port then you need an active converter which are the same as the latter pricing you mentioned.