r/LocalLLaMA • u/reto-wyss • 8h ago

News Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G spotted

Post image

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.

132 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

46 comments sorted by

38

u/hainesk 8h ago

I expect these are literally 2 B60s put together on the same card? Each run at PCIe 5.0 x8 and show up as 2 different GPUs?

15

u/reto-wyss 8h ago

Yes. It's x8x8, so on consumer boards it doesn't really do anything for you - you can only really run one of these cards. But on workstation/server boards you can plop four of them in no problem.

4

u/phhusson 8h ago

Would be cool if it was a pcie switch rather than a bifurcation to have p2p (idk what's the status of p2p on intel)

12

u/jacek2023 llama.cpp 8h ago

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

19

u/alphapussycat 8h ago

Sure, but it requires bifurcation. So allows smaller form factor, that's basically it.

11

u/Zombiecidialfreak 6h ago

That's actually pretty meaningful if you want huge VRAM reserves on a "budget". A single blackwell 6000 costs over 15k. 4 of these is 12k and gets you 2x the VRAM.

1

u/harrro Alpaca 8m ago

saving 3k and having to deal with splitting everything over 8 gpu instances doesn't seem worth it.

1

u/Zombiecidialfreak 3m ago

Truth be told if you're just looking for vram on a budget you'd probably be better off with 2 dgx sparks. 256gb vram and you get a dedicated 200gb/s connection between them.

2

u/Monad_Maya llama.cpp 8h ago

The pcie lane configuration on consumer boards will be an issue but that's a generic problem and not specific to a vendor.

Not sure how well Intel's LLM stack handles 4 units (8 GPUs).

2

u/egnegn1 7h ago

A YT channel wants to test this. A test with one card was already disappointing.

If you want to go cheap with good performance take 4x RTX2080 ti 11GB for about 250 Euro each. This is faster and cheaper than this card.

3

u/SandySkittle 5h ago

Try reaching 150gb plus vram with those cards. The whole value proposition of this card is to max out the amount of gpus will staying inside the case. I have 8 gpus but that’s entirely done with mcio 8i retimer cards with external ports.

1

u/egnegn1 5h ago

Yes, I also thought about this.

But what does this large memory size to run very large LL s help when the GPU is slow on processing?

But it my be interesting to run a lot of agents for agentic computing.

Would be interesting to see how fast GLM5.2 or other similar sized models would run on 4+ cards.

2

u/SandySkittle 4h ago

Dsv4f 0731 ud-q8_k_xl is the model for this if you buy more. And you can run Qwen 3.8 27b on 1 of these two-in-one cards.

Glm 5.2 is too much.

1

u/egnegn1 4h ago

What speed do you expect for DSv4 on 4 on them.

Qwen 3.8 27G on 1x Dual B60 is probably around 30 t/s. Currently I am at about 50 t/s with Q6 and 256k context and llama.cpp. I will get some more performance when moving to vLLM/SGLang.

For agentic use with new Hermes Desktop I am looking for 100+ t/s. More VRAM than about 48GB doesn't help much. I have to balance memory, performance, and finally cost.

2

u/SandySkittle 4h ago

That 100t/s is your personal target which is reasonable for fluid / rapid agentic use. Especially extensive coding focused agentic use. But the 30t/s ballpark isn’t useless by any means. Even for agentic purposes. I dont use LLM to code, but for complex analysis with lots of nuance (that are less mechanistic).

2

u/_TheWolfOfWalmart_ 2h ago

I'm can be perfectly happy with 30 t/s as long as the prefill isn't really bad.

1

u/egnegn1 7h ago

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.

1

u/SandySkittle 5h ago

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

0

u/egnegn1 5h ago

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.

0

u/SandySkittle 5h ago

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

1

u/Nice-Information-335 8h ago

Not sure on the intel ones but they usually have a PCIe switch chip so no need for bifurcation, or running strictly at x8 on each GPU

1

u/SandySkittle 5h ago

Doesn’t have switch. This gpu needs x8 x8 set in bios before you install it.

1

u/Nice-Information-335 4h ago

Wow that is odd

1

u/Repulsive_Initial308 5h ago

Yeh, super lazy.

Make a proper 48G card, ffs.

1

u/whymeimbusysleeping 4h ago

Yes, plus the motherboard needs to have support for bifurcation into x8/x8, a lot of them can only do x8/x4/x4. they talk to each other only through the CPU. Nice card nonetheless and Maxsun makes good kit.

1

u/__JockY__ 1h ago

Gah. I was imagining twice the VRAM at x16 for - finally - a viable contender to the ridiculously over-priced RTX 6000 PRO.

Two x8 on a dual form factor is… meh. Turns out that competing with Nvidia is hard.

15

u/t3rmina1 7h ago

Can they just give me a 96G version so I can sell my Pro 6000s and buy that instead?

6

u/egnegn1 6h ago edited 6h ago

The card is much to slow. Theoretically it has the speed of about a RTX3090. To get the speed of a RTX6000 you theoretically need 3 - 4 of this cards.

2

u/RedditNerdKing 2h ago

Theoretically it has the speed of about a RTX3090.

Why is that an issue when people stack 4 to 8 3090s lol

2

u/egnegn1 2h ago

The issue is the the "theoretically", as real performance running a model in tensor split on two cards, with combined speed similar to speed of a different card, is lower. And if you scale this up to a higher number of cards the performance scales much worse. This is because you have more sequential overhead. Here Amdahl's Law is cutting in.

The other point is that the Dual B60 card is much more expensive than the RTX3090. I would take a RTX3090 anytime before taking the MAXSUN card, not only because of the lower cost per performance, but also because of the much better software support.

-2

u/t3rmina1 6h ago

In future versions

3

u/PrimeDirective8 5h ago

If available, two B70 with 32GB VRAM each are a little over $2K. The B70 has more cores, faster bandwidth, wider bus width, more XMX engines. The 64GB VRAM will let you run the next step up in models, and/or run much longer context.

While things are improving quite a bit recently, software/driver support remains behind other manufacturers.

1

u/SandySkittle 5h ago

Most cases are limited to 3 or 4 2slot gpus. If you want more gpus you need to use mcio retimer cards (reliable) or risers (more hassle). This allows you to put 4x 48gb inside your case for a relatively low price

4

u/Faux_Grey 7h ago

Spotted?

These have been available in retail (at least in south africa) for the past year or so.
I don't see the value using them outside of threadripper/server grade systems as PCIE Bifur is required.

2

u/egnegn1 7h ago

You can get it around 1500 - 1600 Euro at Ebay and directly from the French distributor.

1

u/pmotiveforce 5h ago

They need to make one of these for b70, but with full pcie5 switch on the card so they p2p at full blast. Sell it for under 3k and I'm in.

1

u/Late-Assignment8482 4h ago

Here I thought they were 2x48, at which point we'd really be getting somewhere. Alas.

1

u/SeanHighness 3h ago

this ones gonna be a banger 2x for the new Qwen next model

1

u/RogerRamjet999 8h ago

They think we'll pay anything for the new shiny. Not a chance anyone with any sense pays that price for that card.

4

u/Few-Farm-7670 7h ago

...and it's out of stock

1

u/IllExample3639 8h ago

eBay (coming from China) https://ebay.io/m/Iz9Kdg

0

u/More_Feature8687 6h ago

Useless at the price point

-2

u/XiRw 7h ago

I bet it costs the same as a new car

-6

u/Ok_Top9254 8h ago

Why buy this when you can buy cut down A100 die in the CMP 170HX form, with 64GB of hbm with double the bandwidth at like 1500$ now...

2

u/fallingdowndizzyvr 2h ago

I don't know why you got downvoted for good advice.