Re:Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphi...
by dragontamer on Tuesday December 03, 2024 @04:35PM
(#42311793)
HBM is kind of not fair lol. But 4096-line bus is gonna have more bandwidth than any competitor.
It's pretty expensive though.
The 500GB/sec number is for a more ordinary GPU like the B580 Battlemage in the $250ish price range. Obviously the $2000ish 4090 will be better, but I don't expect the typical consumer to be using those.
Re:Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphi...
by kimixa on Tuesday December 03, 2024 @05:00PM
(#42312032)
But an on-package memory bus has some of the advantages of HBM, just to a lesser extent, so it's arguably comparable as an "intermediate stage" between RAM chips and HBM. Distances are shorter (so voltage drop and capacitance are lower, so can be driven at lower power), routing is more complex but can be worked around by more layers, which increases cost but on a significantly smaller area than required for dimms, and the dimms connections themselves can hurt performance (reflection from poor contacts, optional termination makes things more complex, and the expectations of mix-and-match for dimm vendors and products likely reduce fine tuning possibilities).
There's pretty much a direct opposite scaling between flexibility and performance - dimms > soldered ram > on-package ram > die-interconnects.
Apple is doing 800GB/sec on the M2 Ultra and should reach about 1TB/sec with the M4 Ultra, but that's still lagging behind GPUs. The 4090 is already at the 1TB/sec mark, the 5090 is supposedly aiming for 1.5TB/sec, and the H200 with HBM is doing 5TB/sec.