Intel Linux Graphics Driver To Do A Better Job Of Keeping Track Of Its Engine Busyness

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Linux Graphics Driver To Do A Better Job Of Keeping Track Of Its Engine Busyness

A drm-intel-gt-next pull request was sent in today to DRM-Next of the latest batch of Intel kernel graphics driver updates destined for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-614-Intel-Engine-Busyness

[geerge]

Presumably this helps graphics only, given that guc stands for graphics micro controller? Then again the whole device is called a graphics card so there's a small chance compute is impacted too.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Too bad launch availability was so limited. I set a notification on NewEgg and got an email when they came back in stock. But I was working and didn't see it right away, and when I checked the B580 was sold out again. Now it says January 3rd before they are back in stock.

Edit to add this bit that I just read elsewhere.

“Demand for Arc B580 graphics cards is high and many retailers have sold through their initial inventory. We expect weekly inventory replenishments of the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition graphics card and are working with partners to ensure a steady availability of choices in the market,” Intel spokesperson Mark Anthony Ramirez tells The Verge.

Supposedly inventory at launch was actually decent. Guess gamers going years without a decent new card in that price bracket lead to a lot of pent-up demand. I hope these new cards are a smashing success for Intel and they stay in the dGPU biz.

[geerge]

Too bad launch availability was so limited. I set a notification on NewEgg and got an email when they came back in stock. But I was working and didn't see it right away, and when I checked the B580 was sold out again. Now it says January 3rd before they are back in stock.

Edit to add this bit that I just read elsewhere.



Supposedly inventory at launch was actually decent. Guess gamers going years without a decent new card in that price bracket lead to a lot of pent-up demand. I hope these new cards are a smashing success for Intel and they stay in the dGPU biz.

If you want one I suggest you get notifications of non-intel boards too, from what I can glean the intel limited edition was meant to be just that.

[skeevy420]

Heh, with jobs that only see movement as productivity and gain you have to learn to artificially inflate your busyness metric to show you have a good business metric. In other words, if you have time to lean you have time to clean. Fuck me for actually being efficient.

It's nice seeing Arc improvements and Intel trying to take on the Graphics Duopoly of AMD and NVIDIA.

[Anux]

Demand ... is high ... Intel spokesperson ...

Na that's bullshit, there is hardly any volume produced of those chips. That's why they are instantly "sold out".
If you look at amazon, any other graphics card (even the long out of production Radeon rx 560) is sold more often this month.

Intel probably sells them at a loss or somewhere at break even. Have a look at die sizes:

GeForce RTX 4060    5 nm TSMC 160 mm²
Radeon RX 7600 XT   6 nm TSMC 200 mm²
Arc B580            5 nm TSMC 270 mm²​

And pair that with the news about them loosing their discount at TSMC, it is in Intels best interest to produce as few as possible of those chips or don't sell them to end users but data centers for more money. (not sure if data centers would deal with that "efficiency" class)
It also shows how the other 2 are exploiting their duopoly.

[M@GOid]

I have a hard time believing they had any big stock of those things. No retailer knew how well those cards would be received, not even Intel I think, so no reason to keep a good stock of them. And who can blame them?

Now Intel is running against the clock before Nvidia and AMD announce their new lineup in a month or so, before a good chunk of potential buyers change their minds and decide to go with the usual suspects.

[Quackdoc]

I suppose this is nice, I do check it every now and then to see how far I can push these cards

[Espionage724]

Ew GuC

Not directly related, but I'm still confused about firmware load on pre-Arc. dmesg reports clearly GuC/HuC firmware loading isn't supported and worded to sound like it fails with guc=3, but the sys option shows it definitely load (logs). Apparently there's something about the media driver and better encode or decode with HuC enabled (never tested it) but I'm not actively aware of any differences with it default/0 or forced/3 on UHD 630. I'm also not sure if it interfaces with Management Engine (I have it HAP bit disabled no HECI but GuC/HuC still loads; I vaguely recall one of those 3 being related to i915 PAVP too).

Is there something obvious GuC and HuC firmware do vs not having either where it's optional?

[smitty3268]

Na that's bullshit, there is hardly any volume produced of those chips.
...
Intel probably sells them at a loss or somewhere at break even.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I doubt it's actually at a loss but there's no way they're making money on these cards.