Intel’s new configurable VRAM option gives Core laptops an AI boost

For many months, AMD offered a special treat to enthusiasts wishing to execute Ai Chatbot LLMS on their PC: VRAM configurable which has considerably improved performance. Now Intel can say the same thing.

Bob Duffy, who oversees Intel Ai Playground’s application for the execution of AI art and local chatbots on your PC, has tweeted that the latest Company Arc driver for its integrated GPUs now offers a “shared GPU memory replacement” which offers the possibility of adjusting your PC, provided you have a sustained processor.

It is a big problem for AI and even some games, but not easy. Until now, laptops with an Intel Core processor divide available memory in the middle, by attributing half to the operating system of the PC and half of VRAM. If you have an Intel Core laptop with 32 GB of memory, 16 GB of it would be assigned to AI and games. AMD has taken a different route: although a Ryzen laptop would generally do the same by default, users could either use the AMD adrenaline software, or the laptop BIOS to manually adjust the VRAM.

In daily office work, the split does not mean. But for an AI model, more like theoretically means more performance.

In my tests with Ryzen AI Max of AMD in March, for example, just reallocate 24 GB of the Available System Memory of the Asus Rog Flow Z13 game tablet so that VRAM increased the performance of 64% in certain AI landmarks. A similar test with 64 GB of memory inside the framework office has considerably increased the performance of AI art, chatbots and certain games.

For an AI model, VRAM is essentially the memory of the system. No more VRAM means that you can run a bigger chatbot with a larger number of parameters. In general, AI with the greatest number of parameters gives you the most insightful answers; More VRAM also makes it possible to treat a greater number of tokens, both as a starter and in response that the chatbot has provided. The larger numbers are better, roughly.

Place the Shared GPU memory replacement function in the Intel Graphics software package means that you can reallocate a free RAM to serve as a VRAM before loading an AI chatbot. Although I have not tested the new software myself, I suppose that the default behavior is to leave a minimum amount of RAM (8 GB is typical) for Windows and to attribute the rest to VRAM. For the moment, it is a manual procedure, although it seems likely that the AI of Intel playground and Intel graphic software would work together to reallocate the memory when the latter package is started. The only problem is that the reallocation of memory generally requires you to restart your PC.

Note that it only works with laptops with an integrated arc GPU, not discreet cards.

You will always have to buy a laptop with a substantial quantity of memory to be able to take advantage of the new capacities, and the users report (via videocardz) that it only works with the basic processors Ultra Series 2 of Intel, not the “Meteor Lake” chips inside the intel Core Ultra Series 1. However, it is a big boost for Intel portable computers that has been waiting for a long time.