Intel Announces Arc Pro B70 and Arc Pro B65 GPUs

https://www.techpowerup.com/347703/intel-announces-arc-pro-b70-and-arc-pro-b65-gpus-maxes-out-xe2-battlemage-architecture

by throwaway270925 • 4 months ago

158 111 4 months ago

techpowerup.com

genpfault• 4 months ago

600 GB/s of memory bandwidth isn't anything to sneeze at.

~$1000 for the Pro B70, if Microcenter is to be believed:

https://www.microcenter.com/product/709007/intel-arc-pro-b70...

https://www.microcenter.com/product/708790/asrock-intel-arc-...

qingcharles• 4 months ago

I think the B65 is priced at $650. Both supported by llamacpp I believe. With that power draw you could run two of them.

giancarlostoro• 4 months ago

Intel GPU prices have stayed fine, but I do wonder if they are viable for Inference if they will wind up like Nvidia GPUs, severely overpriced.

hedgehog5• 4 months ago

Recent kernels have SR-IOV support for these chips too. B&H has them listed for $950.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1959142-REG/intel_33p...

When 32GB NVIDIA cards seem to start at around $4000 that's a big enough gap to be motivating for a bunch of applications.

robotnikman• 4 months ago

I'm probably going to snag one of the Intel cards just for the SR-IOV and use with VM's

jauntywundrkind2• 4 months ago

I tend to agree that the vram size and bandwidth is the core thing, but this B70 Pro allegedly has 387 int8 tops vs a 5090 having 3400 int8 tops. 600 compares vs 1792GB/s. I'm delighted so see an option with quarter the price! But man, a tenth the performance? https://www.techpowerup.com/347721/sparkle-announces-intel-a... https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-annou...

wmf3• 4 months ago

It's more like a 70 class card with extra VRAM.

adgjlsfhk1• 4 months ago

especially for exploratory work 1/10th the perf is fine. Intel isn't able to compete head to head with Nvidia (yet), but vram is capability while speed is capacity. There will be plenty of use cases where the value prop here makes sense.

ColonelPhantom• 4 months ago

838 seems to be the real INT8 TOPS number for the 5090; going from 800 to 3400 takes an x2 speedup for sparsity (so skipping ops) and another x2 speedup for FP4 over INT8.

So it's closer to half the speed than a tenth. Intel also seems to be positioning this card against the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell, not the 5090, and that one gets more like 300 INT8 TOPS. It also has less memory but at a slightly higher bandwidth. The 5090 is much faster and IIRC priced similarly to the PRO 4000, but is also decidedly a consumer product which, especially for Nvidia, comes with limitations (e.g. no server-friendly form factor cards available, and there are or used to be driver license restrictions that prevented using a consumer card in a data center setup).

cmovq• 4 months ago

I mean it kind of is considering that's comparable to a 5070 which has 672 GB/s? Benefit of NVIDIA being the only one using GDDR7 for now I guess.

daemonologist2• 4 months ago

7800 XT has 624 GB/s as well, and can be found for $400 used. 16 GB of course.

varispeed• 4 months ago

The product would be excellent in 2024, but now it's a landfill filler. You can run some small models at pedestrian speed, novelty wears off and that's it.

Intel is not looking in the future. If they released Arc Pro B70 with 512GB base RAM, now that could be interesting.

32GB? Meh.

throwaway858253• 4 months ago

It's true that it's severely late and missed it's market window but 512gb just isn't possible.

WarmWash2• 4 months ago

Wake me when they wake up and release a middling card with 128GB memory.

Weryj2• 4 months ago

Buy 4?

electronsoup• 4 months ago

Which mainboards are cheap and have 4 pcie16x (electrical) slots, that don't need weird risers to fit 4 GPUs

WarmWash2• 4 months ago

Because I don't want to spend $4k.

I want to spend $1500 for a card that can run a proper large model, even if it only can do 25 tk/s.

Intel is squandering a golden opportunity to knee-cap AMD and Nvdia, under the totally delusional pretense that intel enterprise cards still have a fighting chance.

zozbot2344• 4 months ago

Buy Strix Halo or Apple Silicon platforms and you get essentially that.

wmf3• 4 months ago

https://newsroom.intel.com/artificial-intelligence/intel-to-...

Probably 160 GB for $4,000.

SmellTheGlove3• 4 months ago

That's a pretty good deal these days.

lostmsu4• 4 months ago

Is PCI-E too much to ask?

nickthegreek• 4 months ago

Both have 32gb vram. Could be a pretty compelling choice.

cptskippy2• 4 months ago

They certainly look viable as replacements for my Tesla P40 for virtual workloads.

vessenes• 4 months ago

Not sure why you'd want this over an apple setup. M4 max is 545GB/s of memory bandwidth - $2k for an entire Mac Studio with 48GB of RAM vs 32 for the B70.

hedgehog5• 4 months ago

Being able to keep infrastructure on Linux is a big advantage.

RestartKernel• 4 months ago

How many compatibility issues is MacOS realistically expected to spur? Windows DX felt unusable to me without a Linux VM (and later WSL), but on MacOS most tooling just kinda seems to work the same.

cptskippy2• 4 months ago

Support for Single Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV) to enable compute and Graphics workloads in virtualized environments.

wyre2• 4 months ago

one can upgrade and swap parts with a computer running an Intel GPU. Linux is very well supported compared to Mac hardware.

fvv• 4 months ago

with those $2k you can have 2xB70, with 1.2Tb/sec and 64G Vram, on linux ( and you can scale further while mac prices increase are not linear 0

Reubend• 4 months ago

You're absolutely right. And these Intel GPUs will also be much faster in terms of actual math than the M series GPUs that the Apple setup would have.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 months ago

Funny, I not sure why anyone would use Apple over Linux.

pjmlp3• 4 months ago

Good support on laptops that I can buy at Media Market, FNAC, Cool Blue,....

Although personally I am more of the Windows/Linux VM workstation laptop kind.

protimewaster• 4 months ago

My thinking is that I'd pick this, because I can't just plug a Mac into a slot in my server and have it easily integrate with all my other hardware across an ultra fast bus.

If they made an M4 on a card that supported all the same standards and was price competitive, though, that might be a good option.

thesmart2• 4 months ago

Because the B70 cards can pipeline 500 tok/s on concurrent workloads. Apple Silicon and Nvidia consumer cards only work well w/ serial workloads.

pjmlp3• 4 months ago

Some folks care about the workstation market, and the flexibility it offers in choice.

whalesalad2• 4 months ago

Anyone running an ARC card for desktop Linux who can comment on the experience? I've had smooth sailing with AMD GPU's but have never tried Intel.

wyre2• 4 months ago

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

toofy• 4 months ago

they put an Intel Arc card inside

just add a little bit:

linus requested the card be intel as well.

oakpond2• 4 months ago

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.

lostmsu4• 4 months ago

small fp8 local model with almost 100k token context

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

robertVance• 4 months ago

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.

Levitating• 4 months ago

Afaik driver support is very complete on Linux. You often see Arc GPUs used in media transcoding workloads for that reason.

HerbManic2• 4 months ago

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.

bpye• 4 months ago

My B580 works fine on Linux. Graphics perf is a bit worse than under Windows, but supposedly compute is pretty much the same.

BizarroLand2• 4 months ago

I'm using a B580 for a windows 10 media pc and it's fine even for moderate gaming when I drop down to 1080p on my 4k tv, although I did notice a little stuttering from time to time.

To be fair, that might be due to still running Windows 10 or due to not having reset the PC in 4 years. It's going to be moved over to Linux soon, I'm just being lazy.

unethical_ban2• 4 months ago

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

himata4113• 4 months ago

Linus Torvalds runs ARC :)

DiabloD33• 4 months ago

Since they fired the entire Arc team and a lot of the senior engineers already updated their Linkedins to reflect their new positions at AMD, Nvidia, and others, as well as laying off most of their Linux driver team (GPU and non-GPU), uh...

WTF?

wtallis2• 4 months ago

This is a chip they've had lying around for a while. It's the same architecture as used in the Arc B580 that launched at the end of 2024; this is just a slightly larger sibling. Intel clearly knew that their larger part wouldn't make for a competitive gaming GPU (hence the lack of a consumer counterpart to these cards), but must have decided that a relatively cheap workstation card with 32GB might be able to make some money.

DiabloD33• 4 months ago

Still seems crooked to sell a GPU that is already lost their driver team and will get no new meaningful updates.

throwaway858253• 4 months ago

Now if they launched the 32GB workstation card in 2024 with cheap RAM it would have been a success.

staticman2• 4 months ago

You are exaggerating, right? They didn't really fire the entire Arc team did they? I couldn't find a source saying that.

DiabloD33• 4 months ago

Nope, no exaggeration.

The news that Celestial is basically canceled already hit the HN front page, as well as Druid has been canceled before tapeout.

Celestial will only be issued in the variant that comes in budget/industrial embedded Intel platforms that have a combined IO+GPU tile, but the performance big boy desktop/laptop parts that have a dedicated graphics tile will ship an Nvidia-produced tile.

There will be no Celestial DGPU variant, nor dedicated tile variant. Drivers will be ceasing support for DGPUs of all flavors, and no new bug fixes will happen for B series GPUs (as there is no B series IGPUs; A series IGPUs will remain unaffected).

They signed the deal like 2-3 months ago to cancel GPUs in favor of Nvidia. The other end of this deal is the Nvidia SBCs in the future will be shipping as big-boy variants with Xeon CPUs, Rubin (replacing Blackwell) for the GPU, Vera (replacing Grace) for the on-SBC GPU babysitter, and newest gen Xeons to do the non-inference tasks that Grace can't handle.

There is also talk that this deal may lead to Nvidia moving to Intel Foundry, away from TSMC. There is also talk that Nvidia may just buy Intel entirely.

For further information, see Moore's Law Is Dead's coverage off and on over the past year.

unethical_ban2• 4 months ago

I didn't know this. Have they officially given up on building discrete GPUs? Is this a last gasp of Arc to offload decent remaining architectures at a lower price than nvidia?

It is crazy to me that a world newly craving GPU architecture for AI, and gamers being largely neglected, that Intel would abandon an established product line.

mschuster91• 4 months ago

It is crazy to me that a world newly craving GPU architecture for AI, and gamers being largely neglected, that Intel would abandon an established product line.

You still need to fab it somewhere. Intel's fabs have been plagued with issues for years, the AI grifters have bought up a lot of TSMCs allotments and what remains got bought up by Apple for their iOS and macOS lineups, and Samsung's fabs are busy doing Samsung SoCs.

And that unfortunately may explain why Intel yanked everything. What use is a product line that can't be sold because you can't get it produced?

Yet another item on my long list of "why I want to see the AI grift industry burn and the major participants rotting in a prison cell".

StilesCrisis• 4 months ago

It does sound like a very Intel choice though.

pjmlp3• 4 months ago

New cards in 2026, and targeting Vulkan 1.3?!

tbyehl• 4 months ago

Where's the A310 / A40 successor? Gimme some SR-IOV in a slot-powered, single-width, low-profile card.

SkyeCA• 4 months ago

32GB of vram for a decent price? I wonder if these will work well for VR, because vram is my current main issue.

aruametello• 4 months ago

(VR enthusiast here, mostly under windows)

intel support has been mild to non existent in the VR space unfortunately. Given the very finicky latency + engine support i wouldn’t bet on a great experience, but hope for the best for more competition in this market. (even amd has a lot of caveats comparing to nvidia)

Footnotes:

* critical "as low as it can be" low latency support on intel XE is still not as mature as nvidia, amd was lagging behind until recently.

* Not sure about "multiprojection" rendering support on intel, lack of support can kill vr performance or make it incompatible. (the optimized vr games often rely on it)

HerbManic2• 4 months ago

It looked like when Intel jumped into this space, they tried to do everything at once. It didnt work well, they were playing catch up to some very mature systems. They are now being much more selective and restrained. The down side is that things like VR support are put on the back burner for years.

Good for most people but if you need that fuctiobality and they dont have it, go somewhere else.

jmward013• 4 months ago

I think this shows a shift in model architecture. MOE and similar need more memory for the compute available than just one big model with a lot of layers and weights. I think this is likely a trend that will accelerate. You build the trade-off in which encourages even more experts which means more of a tradeoff, so more experts.....

zozbot2344• 4 months ago

Most people doing local inference run the MoE layers on CPU anyway, because decode is not compute constrained and wasting the high-bandwidth VRAM on unused weights is silly. It's better to use it for longer context. Recent architectures even offload the MoE experts to fast (PCIe x4 5.0 or similar performance) NVMe: it's slow but it opens up running even SOTA local MoE models on ordinary hardware.

jmward013• 4 months ago

I think you are making my point. Having a little slower, but a lot more, memory on the card would speed this use-case up a lot and remove the need to go to system memory or make it available for very rarely used experts allowing for even larger MOE models running with good performance.

mikelitoris• 4 months ago

Too little too late, classic Intel

SmellTheGlove3• 4 months ago

Any idea if it'll be possible to mix these with nvidia cards? Adding 32GB to a single 3090 setup would be pretty nice.

kadoban2• 4 months ago

The last go around they looked good on paper and then Intel just didn't make any of them to sell.

Announce all you want, if you don't ever ship anything I could buy, who gives a shit.

cmxch3• 4 months ago

The B60 (and the dual edition) were an entire exercise in how NOT to launch a product.

They let people have the B50 but only released the B60 late in the cycle.

kadoban2• 4 months ago

I wasn't even aware they ever _really_ released the B60. When I got bored of paying attention it was ~months after "release" and they just didn't exist to buy. I do technically see them on ebay, so yeah apparently they're out there.

cmxch3• 4 months ago

Good to see that Intel learned to release product to more than just resellers.

Now can we have a 64gb B70 that’s worldwide available and not marked to unicorns like the Maxsun B60 Dual model has been?

lostmsu4• 4 months ago

Nothing like Crossfire/SLI? Not possible to efficiently connect multiple cards for one large model?

thefounder2• 4 months ago

Why don’t they make an GPU optimised for inference/batch jobs with 1 TB of ram ? Everyone wants to run the biggest models locally.

esperent• 4 months ago

I'm not sure it's really possible.

Take a look at the die shot of a 5090:

http://dieshot.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Dieshot-GB202-...

It has 32gb of RAM and memory controllers are about 10% of the the total area. What would you have to do for 1024gb of RAM?

Not to mention the price would be astronomical.

thefounder2• 4 months ago

How is Apple packing 512gb of ram on their cpu?

mmwelt• 4 months ago

At the end of the 2nd paragraph:

Intel will provide certified drivers for Windows 11, Windows 10, and Linux.

Windows 11, OK. Linux, OK. But why Windows 10 for a new product?!

Intel Announces Arc Pro B70 and Arc Pro B65 GPUs

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