(Credit: John Burek)
The tech industry is undergoing rapid change as everyone focuses on AI. Intel is among the companies revving up new silicon and hardware to drive AI workloads, and it is now pushing its AI hardware to the next level with new Arc Pro B70 and B65 graphics cards.
At heart, these are traditional workstation graphics cards engineered to handle compute-intensive workloads. However, they are augmented with powerful AI engines and a large 32GB pool of RAM at an aggressive price. That makes them not just powerful but ideally suited for handling complex AI tasks and the biggest possible AI models.
Editors’ Note: We have updated this article with finalized information regarding the Intel Arc Pro B65's memory bandwidth, correcting an error in Intel's initial release.
Arc Pro B70 and B65 Details: The Battlemage Champion and Its Acolyte
The Intel Arc Pro B70 features an entirely new graphics core we haven’t seen before, and it looks to be Intel’s fastest graphics processor to date.
(Credit: John Burek)The B70 is still based on Intel’s "Battlemage" microarchitecture, which powers all Intel Arc B-series and Intel Arc Pro B-series graphics cards, but it ships with 60% more Xe cores than the second-fastest chip in the series. This loadout gives it a total of 32 Xe2-HPG cores and a grand total of 4,096 pixel shaders. Alongside these shaders are 32 ray-tracing units and 256 XMX engines, the latter of which drive AI performance. Intel said the card is capable of 367 TOPS when running INT8 workloads.
(Credit: Intel)The Arc Pro B70 also has an upgraded 256-bit memory controller and expanded memory support. Each Arc Pro B70 will have 32GB of GDDR6 RAM and a rated bandwidth of 608GBps.
Intel also announced a new Intel Arc Pro B65, which is somewhat less new than the B70 at heart. It uses the same graphics core as the Arc Pro B70, but it has a dozen Xe cores disabled, leaving it with 20 Xe cores, 2,560 shaders, and 160 XMX engines. This arrangement gives it a similar configuration to the Intel Arc B580 consumer/gaming graphics card and the Intel Arc Pro B60 workstation card. The major feature enhancement the B65 offers is an expanded 256-bit memory interface, up from 192-bit on those older cards, alongside a 32GB memory pool, up from a maximum of 24GB on the Arc Pro B60.
The increase in memory capacity may seem questionable at this time, given the ongoing memory shortage, but the large memory capacity is one of the most alluring features of these GPUs. While virtually everything in your computer can benefit from more and faster memory, AI workloads are particularly greedy on that front, and the local RAM allocation limits the size of models you can host in memory. The more complex the AI workload is, the more RAM is required to host and run the AI model, which makes memory capacity of paramount importance. The wider 256-bit memory interface also boosts memory bandwidth, which will improve overall performance.
Intel vs. Nvidia Pro Cards: Battlemage Boss vs. Green Cloud
Spec numbers are always a delight, but at the end of the day, what really matters is how well Intel’s new workstation cards perform against what is currently on the market. Here, Intel is pushing the Arc Pro B70 as a superior option to Nvidia’s "Blackwell"-based RTX Pro 4000 for AI workloads. The RTX Pro 4000 is not Nvidia’s top workstation graphics card, but by Intel’s numbers, the Arc Pro B70 appears to be the better-value option.
(Credit: Intel)Intel’s internal testing showed that the Arc Pro B70 achieved significantly higher token throughput while handling AI workload requests from multiple users. At the same time, Intel also showed that the Arc Pro B70 would be a superior option for running large AI models due to its higher memory capacity.
This latter point is not surprising, as the RTX Pro 4000 is limited to 24GB of RAM, compared with the Arc Pro B70’s 32GB, and the entire point of a higher memory capacity is to run larger AI models. Also, Intel notes that these cards can be set up in arrays of two, four, or eight cards in a workstation or server rack module, to enable multiple AI models queued up in one workstation as needed, or to pool memory allowances for AI models that are too big for one card's memory allocation.
(Credit: Intel)The Arc Pro B70 also has a major price advantage over the RTX Pro 4000. While the Arc Pro B70 costs $949, the Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 costs $1,899. This pricing suggests that Intel deliberately set the Arc Pro B70 to cost half as much as the RTX Pro 4000, but Intel didn’t say this directly.
The Big B70: Coming March 31 for $949
Intel will launch its new Arc Pro B70 and Arc Pro B65 workstation cards on March 31, the same day the company plans to release its new Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus CPUs. There isn’t a fixed price for the Intel Arc Pro B65 at this time, as Intel is leaving the production and sale of these graphics cards entirely in the hands of its OEM board partners.
(Credit: John Burek)An Intel-branded Arc Pro B70, however, will be sold directly by Intel for $949. You will also see versions of the Arc Pro B70 from a host of Intel board partners, including ARKN, ASRock, Gunnir, Maxsun, and Sparkle. The prices on these models will likely vary due to different thermal solutions and other design changes.
(Credit: John Burek)Intel had several models of the Arc Pro B70 on display during its press announcement in New York City. One of the more interesting models on show was a fanless model from Maxsun. These cards use more power than earlier Arc Pros and are likely to get too hot to run fanless without some performance penalty, but this card's thermal design allows air to pass straight through its enclosure and out the back of the case. This design can be particularly useful in systems that are tightly packed with graphics cards and have excellent airflow from case fans.
(Credit: John Burek)Power and display connections on these cards are fully at the discretion of Intel's board partners, and we observed models with the traditional 8-pin PCI Express power connectors alongside others with the newer Nvidia-style 12VHPWR connection. We’ve also heard that one board partner is developing a dual-GPU version of the Arc Pro B70, but it remains unclear whether that card will actually make it into production.