The BC250 is what AMD calls an APU, or Accelerated Processing Unit. It combines a GPU and CPU into a single unit, and was originally built to serve as the heart of certain Samsung rack mount servers. If you know where to find cheap surplus units of the BC250, you can put them to good use for AI work, as [akandr] demonstrates.
The first thing you’ll have to figure out is how to take an individual BC250 APU and get it up and running. It’s effectively a full system-on-chip, combining a Zen 2 CPU with a Cyan Skillfish RDNA 1.5 GPU. However, it was originally intended to run inside a rackmount server unit rather than a standalone machine. To get it going, you’ll need to hook it up with power and some kind of cooling solution.
From there, it’s a matter of software. [akandr] explains how to get AI workflows running on the BC250 using Ollama and Vulkan, while noting useful hacks to improve performance like disabling the GUI and tweaking the CPU governor. The hardware can be used with a wide range of different models depending on what you’re trying to achieve, it just takes some careful management of the APU’s resources to get the most out of it. Thankfully, that’s all in the guide on GitHub.
We’ve already seen these AMD APUs repurposed before for gaming use. Unfortunately the word is out already about their capabilities, so prices have risen significantly in response to demand. Still, if you manage to score a BC250 and do something cool with it yourself, be sure to let us know on the tipsline!
By Samsung he means ASRock?
Board itself was manufactured by ASRock, but Samsung built server rack out of them.
Server rack as also from ASRock, it was used as mining rig. And you can still find in the ebay the full asrock server that contains 12 of these.
Thanks for explanation, I have updated information in readme.
Poor things! 😢 From yay to slop! I had an AMD E-350 APU once.
My sentiments as well
I still have one.
In a working laptop. 2011. IDK but pitting AI to work on it sounds like pain to me.
So that is something else than ASRock 4U12G rack that hosts 12 of these cards?
sorry I think I’ve hit the Reply to akandr’s post above but looks like the post went elsewhere
my understanding its the same, it was just made for Samsung afaik, but wont argue
These are supposed to be used as steam machines. Stop this ai nonsense!
Ah great, now the wannabe “AI developer” sloperators are gonna hoover up all the boards that were pretty much the only currently affordable way to play games, even if it involved Linux shenanigans (to the chagrin of Stockholm syndrome Windows users).
Ahem, “prompt engineers”.
But my thoughts exactly, Hackaday effect gonna yeet these out of affordability
Go get a bog standard realtek wifi device installed in billions of laptops and let us know what Stockholm syndrome really is
No mention of how this is a PS5 APU on GDDR memory? Just cut down from 8 to 6 CPU and only 20 GPU compute. Apparently Bazzite has put back the deprecated patches needed to use the GPU?
Also be informed that you can get non-bootable ones and flash the BIOS with a CH341A clip, it’s what I did.
If you are serious the cheapest way to get them is in the actual 4U enclosure. Then you get (shocking I know. . .) Fans, PSU and an enclosure!?!
These were already doomed to raise in price when the YouTubers started shilling them.
I find it absolutely hilarious that there are people on hackaday complaining that someone is using obsolete something, because they don’t morally approve of the use case. It’s like you have completely forgotten that thats what hackers do, they use things for purposes they were never meant for, a lot of the time to the annoyance of original developers or bystanders.
The quantity of the boards is likely in thousands, the price spikes for a month or 2 and then goes back down as this is a very very niche part. Better this use than ewaste / buying a normal gaming gpu for this use. And the machine even initially got a spike in price because of ETA primes video.
Right? And if you want to play with this and run AI for a few months, you can always repurpose it as a Steam machine. Or vice versa. This is top-tier hacking material. That project page shows some epic experimentation and documentation too.
Sadly though, I haven’t seen the spike cooling off after ETA prime’s video. These really need to come down more, especially since you need a case, PSU and fan for it to be of use for most people.
That is extremely impressive performance for some modest hardware. Nice to see these put to use either as gaming machines or AI playgrounds.