Since they fired the entire Arc team and a lot of the senior engineers already updated their Linkedins to reflect their new positions at AMD, Nvidia, and others, as well as laying off most of their Linux driver team (GPU and non-GPU), uh...
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.
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.
Not sure why you'd want this over an apple setup. M4 max is 545GB/s of memory bandwidth - $2k for an entire Mac Studio with 48GB of RAM vs 32 for the B70.
How many compatibility issues is MacOS realistically expected to spur? Windows DX felt unusable to me without a Linux VM (and later WSL), but on MacOS most tooling just kinda seems to work the same.
It’s not the tooling for me, macOS is just bad as a server OS for many reasons. Weird collisions with desktop security features, aggressive power saving that you have to fight against, root not being allowed to do root stuff, no sane package management, no OOB management, ultra slow OS updates, and generally but most importantly: the UNIX underbelly of macOS has clearly not been a priority for a long time and is rotting with weird inconsistent and undocumented behaviour all over the place.
Provisioning, remote management, containers, virtualization, networking, graphics (and compute), storage, all very different on Mac. The real question is what you would expect to be the same.
For server usage? macOS is the least-supported OS in terms of filesystems, hardware and software. It uses multiple gigabytes of memory to load unnecessary user runtime dependencies, wastes hard drive space on statically-linked binaries, and regularly breaks package management on system upgrades.
At a certain point, even WSL becomes a more viable deployment platform.
600 GB/s of memory bandwidth isn't anything to sneeze at.
~$1000 for the Pro B70, if Microcenter is to be believed:
https://www.microcenter.com/product/709007/intel-arc-pro-b70...
https://www.microcenter.com/product/708790/asrock-intel-arc-...
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.
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.
Since they fired the entire Arc team and a lot of the senior engineers already updated their Linkedins to reflect their new positions at AMD, Nvidia, and others, as well as laying off most of their Linux driver team (GPU and non-GPU), uh...
WTF?
Both have 32gb vram. Could be a pretty compelling choice.
They certainly look viable as replacements for my Tesla P40 for virtual workloads.
Anyone running an ARC card for desktop Linux who can comment on the experience? I've had smooth sailing with AMD GPU's but have never tried Intel.
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.
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
Wake me when they wake up and release a middling card with 128GB memory.
Buy 4?
Which mainboards are cheap and have 4 pcie16x (electrical) slots, that don't need weird risers to fit 4 GPUs
Not sure why you'd want this over an apple setup. M4 max is 545GB/s of memory bandwidth - $2k for an entire Mac Studio with 48GB of RAM vs 32 for the B70.
Being able to keep infrastructure on Linux is a big advantage.
How many compatibility issues is MacOS realistically expected to spur? Windows DX felt unusable to me without a Linux VM (and later WSL), but on MacOS most tooling just kinda seems to work the same.
It’s not the tooling for me, macOS is just bad as a server OS for many reasons. Weird collisions with desktop security features, aggressive power saving that you have to fight against, root not being allowed to do root stuff, no sane package management, no OOB management, ultra slow OS updates, and generally but most importantly: the UNIX underbelly of macOS has clearly not been a priority for a long time and is rotting with weird inconsistent and undocumented behaviour all over the place.
Provisioning, remote management, containers, virtualization, networking, graphics (and compute), storage, all very different on Mac. The real question is what you would expect to be the same.
For server usage? macOS is the least-supported OS in terms of filesystems, hardware and software. It uses multiple gigabytes of memory to load unnecessary user runtime dependencies, wastes hard drive space on statically-linked binaries, and regularly breaks package management on system upgrades.
At a certain point, even WSL becomes a more viable deployment platform.
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
You're absolutely right. And these Intel GPUs will also be much faster in terms of actual math than the M series GPUs that the Apple setup would have.
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.