Man I hope Battlemage is an actually profitable launch, or at least not a massive loss. Otherwise who knows if the next CEO will axe their GPU line. People liked to fearmonger them killing Arc before, with with a new change in management I can actually see that happening.
Its a lower midrange only launch like it appears to be, it will be extremely unprofitable. AMD may even eat large chunks of this market with the Strix Halo APU, which could be similar to the B570 with no need for a discrete GPU.
Theres actually a big and growing demand for ANY high VRAM GPU for the LLM crowd (that AMD is ignoring for inexplicable reasons beyond Strix Halo) but it appears Intel can't even compete there. No 256 bit APU, their GPU is 192 bit so capped at like 24GB...
Intel is totally missing the boat honestly. Their mobile i9 with the built-in GPU can share DDR5 with the video card.
You can put 96 gigs of RAM in a small form factor and load in a monster model. It's not super fast, But it works, and it's a lot faster than not offloading layers off the CPU.
They should be selling nuk sized PCs with built-in graphics and 128 gigs of the fastest RAM they can put on the boards.
yeah, it's definitely not good enough for user-facing work, but if I'm working on development for something like translations, being able to see the 70b output to compare it to other models, it's super useful before I send it off to something that costs more money to run.
9/10 times, the bigger model isn't significantly better for what I'm trying to do, but it's really nice to confirm that.