Hyperfocus Bear: Dirty Spies, a Rusted Can, and a Bad Idea

You better be prepared for me Ethan..

When I see a tight gap with razor-sharp edges and darkness inside, I always want to put my paw there. It’s stronger than the survival instinct. When I see that my custom-made solution can be made even better, although it is hopelessly risky, I say — how hard could that be? Nothing is more interesting than going where no one goes because it’s not interesting for them.

I like empty space without people. The only empty space that scares me to death is my empty tummy. Most scary dream of every Bear — opening a honeypot and finding nothing. Not for me though. It just isn’t. Ol’ Bear says to himself — I’ll find those damn bees and they will pay, honey.

What is the best way to track bees, you might ask? Run tests, of course — every manager Bear knows that. Pure logic would bring you there if you are one. Ten years of being a programmer makes the matter much more obvious, though. So I run tests. It’s all because my TinyB hive ruined my vision of a custom OpenVINO server which is fast. I need to tell you now where all that comes from, because otherwise you might start to sting.

After I finished building my cute TinyB, what was a really fruitful adventure during which I found my pocket Unicorn, I installed my custom OpenVINO server on it. Of course, after installing something new on something new, you need to do… a catwalk. So I did — to compare performance with my envious EnvyStorm and its Intel Arc Pro B60.

What happened later I wanted to blame on HP, but it didn’t work out. My TinyB got splendid results in the fashion category and inference speed — 38 tok/s with Qwen3–8B, after using some fancy math that actually fitted into its VRAM throughput. I was flabbergasted. Unicorn was bored — he just muttered: I told you. I thought to myself that now we must run the same test to compare on the Intel Arc Pro B60. I expected a difference as big as the physical size of those cards.

Intel Arc PRO B50 on top of Arc PRO B60

There are disappointments, and then there are the results of my tests on the B60. I was completely shattered when I found that I had chosen the wrong card to build that server. That B60 is a huge, not-cute-at-all thing and it works at only 47 tok/s with Qwen3–8B. I checked multiple times. I took the card out of the tight, ugly submarine and hugged it like my baby. I talked to it for a while to distract her from the fact that Corporal Claude was making extensive reconnaissance around HP Envy — checking every bit and piece of the digital landscape to prove that our B60 was hurt by bad people from outside.

Claude responded: It’s not his fault. He’s family now. Maybe we are not Italians from the South, but Polish stick together and accept Blue. Only Polish one on that team is Bear — but who cares today, it’s not 1955. A true soldier cares for country and family. Claude did his best.

I pointed him to Intel’s article about B580 performance to set the guidelines and find some reference for the defense line. We got some numbers on the map, we started tracing paths through the token desert. Our poor B60 with my server produced 47 tok/s. The reference for the Intel B580 — same family, same silicon — was 70 tok/s.

Someone chained my baby’s legs when I wasn’t looking. Perhaps it was even a clumsy ol’ Bear of unknown origin. I have an allergy to blame-shifting Bears, so I asked Corporal to launch an intense offensive with simple Python scripts — to prove that my Python knowledge (level 2 on a 2000-point scale) was not the cause of the B60’s misfortune.

We tortured the whole system for perhaps three hours. Conclusions grew like mushrooms on warm… maybe not like mushrooms. Maybe like a pure engineering report. Surprised, huh? You can see that report here if you don’t believe me. Generally it’s a waste of time for a tech-ie. Don’t go there unless you’re a boring engineer.

Summary for non-techies then: my Python skills are great — I mean Claude’s, of course but I’m the manager. True manager always shares success with his employees, right?

By being persistent and loyal towards Intel Arc Pro B60 we discovered something called a ceiling. Most of us have seen one once or twice. Some of us have even seen a glass ceiling. Some of you saw it in Python.

Those who read boring reports and have more points on the Python excellence scale will understand ol’ Bear’s nonsense talk here. I ran another incarnation of Corporal Claude. Trust seems to not be deeply ingrained in Bears — opposite to intelligence. A different Corporal was, of course, fresh — no digital mud on his uniform, head ready to accept the most challenging orders from a trustful manager. Here we meet. Tears in my eyes. I like when people trust their managers. Just not too much.

I told him — I give you this link, it will burn in 30 seconds, you have a mission. It is possible. This link was confidential, but I have a carbon copy here. Then I ordered him to check if my other Corporal was loyal — he was also obliged to find some dirt on Unicorn. They told me some of those Corporals were trained by KGB. They may be right, but the ones I meet are rather from MIT.

My second Corporal came back after reading the repo and reports prepared by his older brother in arms. He confirmed all suspicions and added his own conclusions. It was all very confidential — as usual in case of a mission possible — so I had to finish him after that. I felt bad, but a secret is a secret. Farewell, Ethan Hunt.

With those proofs in hand I started to think about revenge (Italian blood in Bear) — who can pay for that? Intel? HP maybe? What can I even do about it?

Wait, am I hungry? Let’s look under my desk, see what we can find. Nothing. Only a rusted can. At least it’s not rusted VINO, I thought to myself. How hard could that be — to get VINO rusted. Is it even a good name? RustedVINO…

I asked Corporal what he thinks about it and he answered with a metallic voice that Rusted is a blast, but Rust is really fast. What do I know about Rust, though? One point more than about Python. I installed Cargo to get into bodybuilding. It was too light for me. I read something about missing garbage collector. I was afraid that whole garbage will be dumped on me. I heard something about a borrowing pattern. I’m not keen to lend anything to anyone.

I did one project in Rust — more ambitious than “Hello world!”. It was an upgrade: “Hello world. Did you see Unicorn somewhere?” So… how… hard… could… it… be?

Disclaimer: All opinions, ideas, choices and rusted cans described here are exclusively my own. Intel makes good chips. I make trouble and solve some of it for myself. These are separate and independent activities.