Intel's $249 Arc B580 is the GPU we've begged for since the pandemic | PCWorld
Intel's $249 Arc B580 is the GPU we've begged for since the pandemic | PCWorld
Powered by the new Xe2 "Battlemage" architecture and a new XeSS 2 frame generation feature, Intel's $249 Arc B580 is FINALLY bringing 1440p gaming to the masses.
If even half of Intel's claims are true, this could be a big shake up in the midrange market that has been entirely abandoned by both Nvidia and AMD.
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Seems like a decent card, but here are my issues:
- 12 GB RAM - not quite enough to play w/ LLMs
- a little better than my 6650 XT, but not amazingly so
- $250 - a little better than RX 7600 and RTX 4060 I guess? Probably?
If it offered more RAM (16GB or ideally 24GB) and stayed under $300, I'd be very interested because it opens up LLMs for me. Or if it had a bit better performance than my current GPU, and again stayed under $300 (any meaningful step-up is $350+ from AMD or Nvidia).
But this is just another low to mid-range card, so I guess it would be interesting for new PC builds, but not really an interesting upgrade option. So, pretty big meh to me. I guess I'll check out independent benchmarks in case there's something there. I am considering building a PC for my kids using old parts, so I might get this instead of reusing my old GTX 960, the board I'd use only has PCIe 3.0, so I worry performance would suffer and the GTX 960 may be a better stop-gap.
12 GB RAM - not quite enough to play w/ LLMs
Good. Not every card has to be about AI, there's enough of those already; we need gaming cards.
Sure, I'm just saying what I would need for this card to be interesting. It's not much better than what I have, and the extra VRAM isn't enough to significantly change what I can do with it.
So it either needs to have better performance or more VRAM for me to be interested.
It's a decent choice for new builds, but I don't really think it makes sense as an upgrade for pretty much any card that exists today.
Its weird that Intel/AMD seem so disinterested in the LLM self hosting market. I get its not massive, but it seems way big enough for niche SKUs like they were making for blockchain, and they are otherwise tripping over themselves to brand everything with AI.
Exactly. Nvidia's thing is RTX, and Intel/AMD don't seem interested in chasing that. So their thing could be high mem for LLMs and whatnot. It wouldn't cost them that much (certainly not as much as chasing RTX), and it could grow their market share. Maybe make an extra high mem SKU with the same exact chip and increase the price a bit.
Well AMD won't do it ostensibly because they have a high mem workstation card market to protect, but the running joke is they only sell like a dozen of those a month, lol.
Intel literally had nothing to lose though... I don't get it. And yes, this would be a very cheap thing for them to try, just a new PCB (and firmware?) which they can absolutely afford.
They might not even need a new PCB, they might be able to just double the capacity of their mem chips. So yeah, I don't understand why they don't do it, it sounds like a really easy win. It probably wouldn't add up to a ton of revenue, but it makes for a good publicity stunt, which could help a bit down the road.
AMD got a bunch of publicity w/ their 3D Cache chips, and that cost a lot more than adding a bit more memory to a GPU.
Are the double capacity GDDR6X ICs being sold yet? I thought they weren't and "double" cards like the 4060 TI were using 2 chips per channel.
I'm really not sure, and I don't think we have a teardown yet either, so we don't know what capacities they're running.
Regardless, whether it's a new PCB or just swapping chips shouldn't matter too much for overall costs.
If their claims are true, I'd say this is a decent upgrade from my RX 6600 XT and I'm very likely buying one.
Sounds like a ~10% upgrade, but I'd definitely wait for independent reviews because that could be optimistic. It's certainly priced about even with the 6600 XT.
But honestly, if you can afford an extra $100 or so, you'd be better off getting a 6800 XT. It has more VRAM and quite a bit better performance, so it should last you a bit longer.
There are some smaller Ollama Llama 3.2 models that would fit on 12GB. I’ve run some of the smaller Llama 3.1 models under 10GB on NVIDIA GPUs