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Running dual Pro B60 on Debian stable mostly for AI coding.

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.

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> small fp8 local model with almost 100k token context

Would not fit Qwen3.5 27B would it? That's the SOTA

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Afaik driver support is very complete on Linux. You often see Arc GPUs used in media transcoding workloads for that reason.
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We can all agree that Intel absolutely nailed it with the media encoding on these things. A nice to have for many, vital for others.
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quicksync has been around for ages its surprising to me that other platorms have not adopted this. no reason a modern cpu can't transcode video.
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Quicksync doesn't do its work on the CPU, it does the work on the integrated GPU. Their processors that did not have on-board graphics did not have Quicksync support. See their P series and many of their Xeon parts which do not carry Quicksync support, while the versions with integrated graphics do have it.

AMD chips that have integrated GPUs (their APU series of chips) often do have support for hardware video encoders. Because, once again, its a function of the GPU and not the CPU.

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Linus Torvalds runs ARC :)
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Ive ran arc on fedora for years and for general desktop use it’s been perfect. For llm’s/coding it’s getting better but it’s rough around the edges. Had a bug where trying to get vram usage through pytorch would crash the system, ect.
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My B580 works fine on Linux. Graphics perf is a bit worse than under Windows, but supposedly compute is pretty much the same.
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There was the video a little while back where LTT built a computer for Linus Torvalds and they put an Intel Arc card inside, so I'd imagine Linux support is at the very least, acceptable.

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

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I'm running A-series Arc for media transcoding and it works just fine.
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