You can tell by the shape of the board that it's meant to go into a server chassis behind a stack of 80mm blower fans. It's not meant for consumers, but you will be able to buy it used for $200 off ebay in 7 years to put in your home lab.
you won't be able to buy it for $200 in 7 years. 7 year old GPUs are still going for more than that, and take into account inflation and demand for these things. My bet is that you will not be able to buy it not even for < $4000 in 7 years
Wonder if there will be consumer video drivers for these GPUs once the AI hardware shortage is over. Hope to buy a gaming rig one day that doesn't cost a fortune.
I remember back in the day of AGP cards around 2002, you could use a 3d card on linux to render the grafix but use a different GPU for the actual output. I used XFree86 on linux with a voodoo banshee (or maybe was a riva tnt2) and a matrox mga200 for its sync-on-green support with my monitor to play games.
I know modern card architecture doesn't support this out of the box, but what is the actuall problem of forwarding a once-rendered frame to another card for output? Sureley DMA transfers PCIe->RAM->PCIe nowaday are fast enough to saturate 60fps at 4K?
Trivial to do this on Linux. I run my desktop on the on-chip Ryzen 9950X iGPU and I offload games to my nVidia dGPU.
I had a crazier setup in the past with the Intel i7-8809G APU: it had an AMD iGPU for desktop connected to the display, nVidia eGPU for games and the Intel iGPU for video encoding.
Of course there is additional latency due to frame copying, but I can’t notice it in practice.
I had that setup working back in the day with a Voodoo1 which had the pass-trough construction to take over full screen: only on Linux you could read the completed frames and render them in an X window. It was dog slow though.
While transfers have improved a lot the amount data needed for 4K60 with HDR is about 18Gbps. There's no way that doesn't have an impact.
We cooked up a setup where we had a PCI video card for X, and a separate Voodoo 1 or 2 and monitor for 3D (Mesa) rendering. I don't remember the details any more, but it was nice to not take out the desktop when someone borked up their OGL homework.
the voodoo1 worked differently as you looped through the video input. The voodoo banshee i mentioned was a separate 2d/3d card (it actually was 3DFx first true, combined 2d/3d card - not an accelerator).
I know. Voodoo 1 and 2 had the ugly VGA passthrough hack.
But the principle of reading VRAM from one card and copying it to another would remain the same I think.
in latest gamersnexus video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4c2FSSaCsw Wendell from Level1 Techs was showing some older Amazon dedicated server GPUs with no video output that got hacked community driver making it work like laptop dgpu copying rendered video across PCIe.
As has been claimed every year for the last 30, at least. Much like predicting the end of the world, one day, if you keep at it, you'll actually be right.
I think he meant Intel shuts down their graphics division, not Intel shutting down. It's very easy to believe as they've shut down pretty much everything they've tried other than CPUs.
I wonder how they feel about selling their RAM business a few years ago.
Intel ai gpu division is so aggressively anti “small” consumer. I think it has something to do with low volume and a small sales/distribution network. The data center cards I have from amd and nvidia are grey market at best. I don’t think intel moved enough units to establish alternate channels.
It's a workstation card targeted specifically at inference. It's also their only late gen "AI GPU" arch available, baring the release of the D270 this thread is about.
What I don't understand is: when you only plan for your product to have 10 customers, why even make a marketing page like this for it? At that point it's essentially the hardware equivalent of consultingware, something you sell to your existing contacts through outbound calls and by shoving ads through the B2B equivalent of a post-consumer sales channel (i.e. proactive outreach by your org's internal champion for that customer, to said customer.)
You can tell by the shape of the board that it's meant to go into a server chassis behind a stack of 80mm blower fans. It's not meant for consumers, but you will be able to buy it used for $200 off ebay in 7 years to put in your home lab.
you won't be able to buy it for $200 in 7 years. 7 year old GPUs are still going for more than that, and take into account inflation and demand for these things. My bet is that you will not be able to buy it not even for < $4000 in 7 years
Wonder if there will be consumer video drivers for these GPUs once the AI hardware shortage is over. Hope to buy a gaming rig one day that doesn't cost a fortune.
You can vibe-code the drivers. Someone just did that with the Nvidia drivers for Intel Macs, bless their soul.
I dont think it has a video out
I remember back in the day of AGP cards around 2002, you could use a 3d card on linux to render the grafix but use a different GPU for the actual output. I used XFree86 on linux with a voodoo banshee (or maybe was a riva tnt2) and a matrox mga200 for its sync-on-green support with my monitor to play games.
I know modern card architecture doesn't support this out of the box, but what is the actuall problem of forwarding a once-rendered frame to another card for output? Sureley DMA transfers PCIe->RAM->PCIe nowaday are fast enough to saturate 60fps at 4K?
Trivial to do this on Linux. I run my desktop on the on-chip Ryzen 9950X iGPU and I offload games to my nVidia dGPU.
I had a crazier setup in the past with the Intel i7-8809G APU: it had an AMD iGPU for desktop connected to the display, nVidia eGPU for games and the Intel iGPU for video encoding.
Of course there is additional latency due to frame copying, but I can’t notice it in practice.
I had that setup working back in the day with a Voodoo1 which had the pass-trough construction to take over full screen: only on Linux you could read the completed frames and render them in an X window. It was dog slow though.
While transfers have improved a lot the amount data needed for 4K60 with HDR is about 18Gbps. There's no way that doesn't have an impact.
We cooked up a setup where we had a PCI video card for X, and a separate Voodoo 1 or 2 and monitor for 3D (Mesa) rendering. I don't remember the details any more, but it was nice to not take out the desktop when someone borked up their OGL homework.
the voodoo1 worked differently as you looped through the video input. The voodoo banshee i mentioned was a separate 2d/3d card (it actually was 3DFx first true, combined 2d/3d card - not an accelerator).
I know. Voodoo 1 and 2 had the ugly VGA passthrough hack. But the principle of reading VRAM from one card and copying it to another would remain the same I think.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PRIME
> We want to render applications on the more powerful card and send the result to the card which has display connected.
in latest gamersnexus video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4c2FSSaCsw Wendell from Level1 Techs was showing some older Amazon dedicated server GPUs with no video output that got hacked community driver making it work like laptop dgpu copying rendered video across PCIe.
In 2 years once it fails and Intel shuts it down completely you mean :)
As has been claimed every year for the last 30, at least. Much like predicting the end of the world, one day, if you keep at it, you'll actually be right.
I think he meant Intel shuts down their graphics division, not Intel shutting down. It's very easy to believe as they've shut down pretty much everything they've tried other than CPUs.
I wonder how they feel about selling their RAM business a few years ago.
Wonder if today's ram will go up price by then...
It is going up one way or another- the price of money will go down - @5% inflation over 8 years the value of today’s dollar will be 67.7c .
> Can I actually buy this?
No. Certainly not now, maybe not ever. That is the least consumer-focused product page I've seen today.
Intel ai gpu division is so aggressively anti “small” consumer. I think it has something to do with low volume and a small sales/distribution network. The data center cards I have from amd and nvidia are grey market at best. I don’t think intel moved enough units to establish alternate channels.
How so? You can walk into Micro Center and buy a B70 right now. Intel is the only one to offer license-free SR-IOV too.
Thats not an AI GPU its a consumer product.
It's a workstation card targeted specifically at inference. It's also their only late gen "AI GPU" arch available, baring the release of the D270 this thread is about.
Serious question, would they bother?
You can work with 10 players that will buy all of them with minimal effort.
What I don't understand is: when you only plan for your product to have 10 customers, why even make a marketing page like this for it? At that point it's essentially the hardware equivalent of consultingware, something you sell to your existing contacts through outbound calls and by shoving ads through the B2B equivalent of a post-consumer sales channel (i.e. proactive outreach by your org's internal champion for that customer, to said customer.)
Because they want the hype to make the stock go up.
In fairness, they spent 5 cents generating it with Claude.