I was initially confused what packages were needed (backports kernel + ubuntu kobuk team ppa worksforme). After getting that right I'm now running vllm mostly without issues (though I don't run it 24/7).

At first had major issues with model quality but the vllm xpu guys fixed it fast.

Software capability not as good as nvidia yet (i.e. no fp8 kv cache support last I checked) but with this price difference I don't care. I can basically run a small fp8 local model with almost 100k token context and that's what I wanted.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA

If they made an M4 on a card that supported all the same standards and was price competitive, though, that might be a good option.

Intel is not looking in the future. If they released Arc Pro B70 with 512GB base RAM, now that could be interesting.

32GB? Meh.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1959142-REG/intel_33p...

When 32GB NVIDIA cards seem to start at around $4000 that's a big enough gap to be motivating for a bunch of applications.

It is crazy to me that a world newly craving GPU architecture for AI, and gamers being largely neglected, that Intel would abandon an established product line.

Probably 160 GB for $4,000.

At a certain point, even WSL becomes a more viable deployment platform.

You still need to fab it somewhere. Intel's fabs have been plagued with issues for years, the AI grifters have bought up a lot of TSMCs allotments and what remains got bought up by Apple for their iOS and macOS lineups, and Samsung's fabs are busy doing Samsung SoCs.

And that unfortunately may explain why Intel yanked everything. What use is a product line that can't be sold because you can't get it produced?

Yet another item on my long list of "why I want to see the AI grift industry burn and the major participants rotting in a prison cell".

The news that Celestial is basically canceled already hit the HN front page, as well as Druid has been canceled before tapeout.

Celestial will only be issued in the variant that comes in budget/industrial embedded Intel platforms that have a combined IO+GPU tile, but the performance big boy desktop/laptop parts that have a dedicated graphics tile will ship an Nvidia-produced tile.

There will be no Celestial DGPU variant, nor dedicated tile variant. Drivers will be ceasing support for DGPUs of all flavors, and no new bug fixes will happen for B series GPUs (as there is no B series IGPUs; A series IGPUs will remain unaffected).

They signed the deal like 2-3 months ago to cancel GPUs in favor of Nvidia. The other end of this deal is the Nvidia SBCs in the future will be shipping as big-boy variants with Xeon CPUs, Rubin (replacing Blackwell) for the GPU, Vera (replacing Grace) for the on-SBC GPU babysitter, and newest gen Xeons to do the non-inference tasks that Grace can't handle.

There is also talk that this deal may lead to Nvidia moving to Intel Foundry, away from TSMC. There is also talk that Nvidia may just buy Intel entirely.

For further information, see Moore's Law Is Dead's coverage off and on over the past year.

I want to spend $1500 for a card that can run a proper large model, even if it only can do 25 tk/s.

Intel is squandering a golden opportunity to knee-cap AMD and Nvdia, under the totally delusional pretense that intel enterprise cards still have a fighting chance.

Linux is not immune to BIOS/UEFI firmware attacks either. Secure Boot, TPM, and LUKS can work well together, but you still depend on proprietary firmware that you do not fully control. LogoFAIL is a good example of that risk, especially in an evil maid scenario involving temporary physical access. I think Apple has tighter control over this layer.

I can't see the future, but I can see patterns: the media that reports straight from the industry rumor mill LOVES this "Intel has cancelled its GPUs" story, for whatever reason. I have no particular love for Intel (out of my six current systems, my only Intel box is a cheap NUC from 2018), but at this point, these rumors echo the old joke about economists who "accurately predicted the last nine out of two recessions".

They're still going to be employing some developers for driver maintenance for the sake of their iGPUs, and that might be enough for these cards.

What's cheap to you? You can find Epyc 7002/7003 boards on ebay in the $400 range and those will do it. That's probably the best deal for 4x PCIE 4.0 x16 and DDR4. Probably $500 range with a CPU. That's in the ballpark of a mid to high end consumer setup these days.