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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

Intel Announces Arc Pro B70 and Arc Pro B65 GPUs, Maxes Out Xe2 "Battlemage" Architecture

Intel today announced the Arc Pro B70 and Arc Pro B65 graphics cards for advanced AI compute workloads on workstations, and professional visualization. The two primarily target local inferencing, software development, and deployments in multi-GPU configurations for rack scale AI GPU compute accelera...

TechPowerUp

genpfault 2d 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 1d 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 1d 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.

hedgehog 1d 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.

Intel Arc Pro B70 Graphics Card

Buy Intel Arc Pro B70 Graphics Card featuring 2800 MHz Boost Clock Speed, 32 Xe Cores | 256 XMX AI Engines, Xe2 Architecture | 32 RT Units, 32GB of ECC GDDR6 VRAM, 256-Bit Memory Interface, 608 GB/s Memory Bandwidth, DisplayPort 2.1, 7680 x 4320 @ 120 Hz Max Resolution, PCI Express 5.0 x16 Interface. Review Intel B70

WarmWash 2d ago

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

Buy 4?

electronsoup 1d ago

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

nickthegreek 1d ago

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

cptskippy 1d ago

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

whalesalad 1d 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.

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

Building the PERFECT Linux PC with Linus Torvalds

YouTube

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.

DiabloD3 1d 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?

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.

staticman2 1d ago

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