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

68•throwaway270925•2h ago

Comments

genpfault•1h 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•1h 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•1h 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•1h 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.

WarmWash•1h ago

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

Weryj•54m ago

Buy 4?

electronsoup•35m ago

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

nickthegreek•1h ago

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

cptskippy•56m ago

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

vessenes•1h 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.

hedgehog•59m ago

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

RestartKernel•37m 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.

einr•23m ago

It’s not the tooling for me, macOS is just bad as a server OS for many reasons. Weird collisions with desktop security features, aggressive power saving that you have to fight against, root not being allowed to do root stuff, no sane package management, no OOB management, ultra slow OS updates, and generally but most importantly: the UNIX underbelly of macOS has clearly not been a priority for a long time and is rotting with weird inconsistent and undocumented behaviour all over the place.

hedgehog•19m ago

Provisioning, remote management, containers, virtualization, networking, graphics (and compute), storage, all very different on Mac. The real question is what you would expect to be the same.

bigyabai•15m ago

For server usage? macOS is the least-supported OS in terms of filesystems, hardware and software. It uses multiple gigabytes of memory to load unnecessary user runtime dependencies, wastes hard drive space on statically-linked binaries, and regularly breaks package management on system upgrades.

At a certain point, even WSL becomes a more viable deployment platform.

cptskippy•57m ago

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

wyre•55m ago

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

fvv•48m 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•24m 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•35m ago

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

whalesalad•58m 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.

wyre•52m 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

oakpond•40m 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.

DiabloD3•14m 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?

wtallis•8m 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.

staticman2•8m ago

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