[wink]

I really wonder who this is for?

It's not competing with amd/nvidia at twice the price on terms of performance, but it's also too expensive for a cheap gaming rig. And then there are people who are happy with integrated graphics.

Maybe I'm just lacking imagination here, I don't do anything fancy on my work and couch laptops and I have a proper gaming PC.

[ryukoposting]

Last time I had anything to do with the low-mid range pro GPU world, the use case was 3D CAD and certain animation tasks. That was ~10 years ago, though.

[numpad0]

CAD, and medical were always the use case for high end workstations and professional GPUs. Companies designing jets and cars need more than iGPU, but they prefer slim desktops and something distanced from games.

[sznio]

Accelerated AV1 encoding for a home server.

[hackerfoo]

I’m interested in putting one of these in a server because of the relatively low power usage and compact size.

[askl]

Why would you need a dedicated graphics card in a server? Usually you wouldn't even have a monitor connected.

[einsteinx2]

I have an NVidia Tesla P40 in my home NAS/media server that I use for video encoding purposes. It doesn’t even have any video outputs, but it does have dual media encoders and a decent amount of VRAM for lots of (relatively) high quality simultaneous transcoding streams using NVENC/NVDEC to re-encode 4K Blu-ray remux’s on the fly.

[akaij]

My guess would be video encoding/decoding and rendering.

[shellwizard]

Some Intel and AMD CPU come with an iGPU that you can use to transcode videos even some Xeons, there's no need to add a GPU just for that

[einsteinx2]

A lot of them don’t though. My Xeon doesn’t, so I threw a cheap used Nvidia Tesla P40 in there to do the job. Also it can handle a lot more simultaneous streams than any iGPU I’m aware of.

[imtringued]

Some people are tired of rendering everything on the CPU via AVX.

[topspin]

An obvious use case is high-end NVRs. Low power, ample GPU for object detection/tracking, ample encoders for streaming. Should make a good surveillance platform.

With SR-IOV* there is a low cost path for GPU in virtual machines. Until now this has (mostly) been a feature exclusive to costly "enterprise" GPUs. Combine that with the good encoders and some VDI software and you have VM hosted GPU accelerated 3D graphics to remote displays. There are many business use cases for this, and no small number of "home lab" use cases as well.

Linux is a first class citizen with Intel's display products, and B50/60 is no different, so it's a nice choice when you want a GPU accelerated Linux desktop with minimum BS. Given the low cost and power, it could find its way into Steam consoles as well.

Finally, Intel is the scrappy competitor in this space: they are being very liberal with third parties and their designs, unlike the incumbents. We're already seeing this with Maxsun and others.

* Intel has promised this for B50/60 in Q4