Intel Arc B580 Delivers Promising Linux GPU Compute Potential for Battlemage
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
The intel arc cards are NOT power efficient based on other reviews. Very similar total power draw for the B580 to the 4070 based on other reviews. The perf/watts should be damning but this review doesn’t state that.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-graphics-linu...
I don't think it makes much sense here because the gap is not that large. The B580 consumes more power (let's say about 50W though it seems to be a smaller delta in a lot of cases) than a RTX 4060 but it's also faster and 50$ cheaper.
Even at a fairly high electricity rate of $0.32/kWh, you are looking at 20 hours of play to get 1kWh consumed. That means you need to game a whopping 3125 hours to get to breakeven.
So not great.. but yeah, still would need to run 24x365 to get to $50.
People building home servers aren't a big customer base. In other words, you don't really matter to them.
And even if we're talking about datacenter GPUs power usage should be a relatively much smaller issue than for CPUs because of how expensive they are e.g. depreciation for something like the H100 (assuming it actually starts losing value any time soon...) is more than the power + cooling costs anyway.
Really, for most users, all that matters is price, performance and functionality.
With a CPU it matters a little more since you need to get cooling yourself.
Heavy gaming users would probably hit the cost vs usage overlap of the extra power draw as well.
For other users Idle vs idle power draw is something and the intel cards have been very bad with this too so it would be nice to state it.
Lastly I use it as a proxy for architecture head room which is just something I like to get a feel for. I suspect Intel would need a completely new architecture to get into datacenters and this is good to know.
I'm not saying Intel shouldn't improve that aspect, they should. But to me it's kinda silly to focus on.
As for using B580's for compute, I don't really see the appeal when so much more powerful options exist.
They absolutely would not. Maybe if they’re paying California or Germany electric bills, and even that is still not a huge impact. For every other home desktop user it doesn’t matter.
That said, GamersNexus pointed out that these cards have somewhat poor idle power consumption.
The truth is Nvidia is somewhat untouchable on performance per watt right now so their competitors at some point have to throw power at it in order to make a marketable card.
Finally, it’s also notable that this Intel card performs better than the 4060 as resolutions get higher. So there may be some light gamers looking in the $250-300 price range who are playing a certain type of game where they want to be able to run high resolutions on a budget card where this SKU makes sense.
Playing a lower graphical intensity game on a high resolution display would be the sweet spot for this card it seems. The card might draw more power than a 4060 but it can outperform it in the right scenario and be acquired for a lower price.
Who are these "a lot of users" doing this? Are they "a lot" of the total gamers' market share this card is aimed at, or are they "a lot" in your reality/bubble?
It was fine when playing games (windows), totally comparable to AMD/Nvidia,
https://youtu.be/JjdCkSsLYLk?si=pUDwsGkCuenr2Iol&t=1874
it did poorly at idle (30+ watts).
I guess GN did not enable ASPM?
Would be nice if 16gig mem was the default to give some future headroom and for people wanting to do AI.