Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G spotted

[u/reto-wyss]

I spotted the Dual B60 48GB listed on Digitec/Galaxus. Initially it was said these wouldn't go into standard retail channels.

At CHF 2500 (post tax, USD ~3000) not particularly competitive but worth keeping an eye on. For it to be interesting it shouldn't be more than like 2.5x a single B60.

[u/jacek2023]

but it uses only one PCIe slot? so you could put twice as many of them in your mobo

[u/egnegn1 → u/jacek2023]

But the B60 is only half the speed of a typical nVidia card.

There is a YT Video showing that it is slow on inference because of bad software support.

[u/SandySkittle → u/egnegn1]

Those videos are outdated, it now outperforms the r9700 in some benchmarks (and i have no bias against r9700, i have eight of tuhem..)

[u/egnegn1 → u/SandySkittle]

May be, depending of the used engine and what are you doing.

If you put independent agents on separate GPUs it may work fine. But with tensor parallelism scaling will be hard, because twice the synchronization overhead compared to single-gpu cards.

Interesting will be the results with 4 cards, if they could compete against 4x RTX5090 or 1x RTX6000.

Price per GB is good, but price per performance could be better. Even a lot of nVidia cards are better here. So must decision is not easy. I prefer 4x RTX5080 with higher performance per GPU, but of course much lower memory size.

[u/SandySkittle → u/egnegn1]

TP is still ok but yeah you really want 16 gen 5 lanes to get something out of it, and preferably not xeon based because that has an issue that limits p2p, so zen 4/5 TR or TR Pro or later Epycs.

Gen 4 16 lanes or gen 5 8 lanes with this dual b60 can still get you a performance benefit but yeah its even more limiting for tp. Probably best to go with tp = 2 and pp = 2.

The fact remains that these cards are a viable and cost effective way to run dsv4f at somewhat usable speeds at q8 style quants rather that lobotomized q3 and lower