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Comment by jauntywundrkind

5 hours ago

I tend to agree that the vram size and bandwidth is the core thing, but this B70 Pro allegedly has 387 int8 tops vs a 5090 having 3400 int8 tops. 600 compares vs 1792GB/s. I'm delighted so see an option with quarter the price! But man, a tenth the performance? https://www.techpowerup.com/347721/sparkle-announces-intel-a... https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-annou...

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jauntywundrkind

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ColonelPhantom  2 hours ago

838 seems to be the real INT8 TOPS number for the 5090; going from 800 to 3400 takes an x2 speedup for sparsity (so skipping ops) and another x2 speedup for FP4 over INT8.

So it's closer to half the speed than a tenth. Intel also seems to be positioning this card against the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell, not the 5090, and that one gets more like 300 INT8 TOPS. It also has less memory but at a slightly higher bandwidth. The 5090 is much faster and IIRC priced similarly to the PRO 4000, but is also decidedly a consumer product which, especially for Nvidia, comes with limitations (e.g. no server-friendly form factor cards available, and there are or used to be driver license restrictions that prevented using a consumer card in a data center setup).

  • jauntywundrkind  2 hours ago

    Thank you for the correction. That seemed way too lopsided to be believed. This assessment balances the memory to tops ratio much much more evenly, which is to be expected! I was low key hoping someone would help me make sense of how wildly disparate figures were, but I wasn't seeing.

    AMD R9700 is 378/766 tops int8 dense/sparse. 644GB/s of 32GB memory. ~$1400. To throw one more card into the mix. Intel undercutting that nicely here.

    You're right that for companies, the pro grade matters. For us mere mortals, much less so. Features like sr-iov however are just fantastic so see! Good job Intel. AMD has been trickling out such capabilities for a decade (cards fused for "MxGPU" capability) & it makes it such an easier buy to just offer it straight up across the models.

adgjlsfhk1  3 hours ago

especially for exploratory work 1/10th the perf is fine. Intel isn't able to compete head to head with Nvidia (yet), but vram is capability while speed is capacity. There will be plenty of use cases where the value prop here makes sense.