[HN Gopher] Intel Announces Arc Pro B70 and Arc Pro B65 GPUs
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Intel Announces Arc Pro B70 and Arc Pro B65 GPUs
Author : throwaway270925
Score : 135 points
Date : 2026-03-26 14:36 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techpowerup.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techpowerup.com)
| genpfault wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm probably going to snag one of the Intel cards just for
| the SR-IOV and use with VM's
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| 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...
| wmf wrote:
| It's more like a 70 class card with extra VRAM.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Thank you for the correction. That seemed way too lopsided
| to be believed. This assessment balances the memory to tops
| ratio much much more evenly, which is to be expected! I was
| low key hoping someone would help me make sense of how
| wildly disparate figures were, but I wasn't seeing.
|
| AMD R9700 is 378/766 tops int8 dense/sparse. 644GB/s of
| 32GB memory. ~$1400. To throw one more card into the mix.
| Intel undercutting that nicely here.
|
| You're right that for companies, the pro grade matters. For
| us mere mortals, much less so. Features like sr-iov however
| are just _fantastic_ so see! Good job Intel. AMD has been
| trickling out such capabilities for a decade (cards fused
| for "MxGPU" capability) & it makes it such an easier buy
| to just offer it straight up across the models.
| cmovq wrote:
| 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.
| daemonologist wrote:
| 7800 XT has 624 GB/s as well, and can be found for $400 used.
| 16 GB of course.
| varispeed wrote:
| 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.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Wake me when they wake up and release a middling card with 128GB
| memory.
| Weryj wrote:
| Buy 4?
| electronsoup wrote:
| Which mainboards are cheap and have 4 pcie16x (electrical)
| slots, that don't need weird risers to fit 4 GPUs
| irishcoffee wrote:
| If your actual gripe is risers, sounds like a "you"
| problem, not a technical problem.
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| Even if you're fine with risers, that might not be
| enough. If the bridge lanes are PCIe Gen 3, as many
| consumer boards have, your Gen 5 card might not init. I
| extensively tested several motherboards to try and get my
| AM5 CPU talking to a triple Radeon AI Pro 9700 XT setup,
| and they absolutely refuse to come up on PCIe3. I was
| using dummy EDID plugs for them, so they think they have
| a display, ruling out that issue.
|
| What I eventually had to do was buy a used Threadripper
| box to run those cards, because PCIe Gen 4 definitely
| works.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| Consumer CPUs don't have enough PCIE lanes to do that. Even
| if they had physical x16 slots, at most two of them would
| be x16.
|
| What's cheap to you? You can find Epyc 7002/7003 boards on
| ebay in the $400 range and those will do it. That's
| probably the best deal for 4x PCIE 4.0 x16 and DDR4.
| Probably $500 range with a CPU. That's in the ballpark of a
| mid to high end consumer setup these days.
| WarmWash wrote:
| 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.
| ericd wrote:
| I saw a good quote recently, "you're not going to get 128
| gigs of vram loose in a plastic bag for that much".
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Buy Strix Halo or Apple Silicon platforms and you get
| essentially that.
| wmf wrote:
| https://newsroom.intel.com/artificial-intelligence/intel-to-...
|
| Probably 160 GB for $4,000.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| That's a pretty good deal these days.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Is PCI-E too much to ask?
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Both have 32gb vram. Could be a pretty compelling choice.
| cptskippy wrote:
| They certainly look viable as replacements for my Tesla P40 for
| virtual workloads.
| vessenes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Being able to keep infrastructure on Linux is a big advantage.
| RestartKernel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| wolfhumble wrote:
| > Weird collisions with desktop security features
|
| Linux is not immune to BIOS/UEFI firmware attacks either.
| Secure Boot, TPM, and LUKS can work well together, but
| you still depend on proprietary firmware that you do not
| fully control. LogoFAIL is a good example of that risk,
| especially in an evil maid scenario involving temporary
| physical access. I think Apple has tighter control over
| this layer.
| functional_dev wrote:
| Yeah... attacks like LogoFAIL hit during the DXE and BDS
| phases when the firmware is acting as its own 'mini OS'
| before the handoff
|
| Easier to comprehend here - https://vectree.io/c/uefi-
| firmware-architecture-principles
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| You completely misunderstood the quoted remark you
| responded to. The desktop security features in MacOS that
| interfere with unblessed binaries and libraries loading
| is a huge pain in the ass, especially for headless server
| use.
| hedgehog wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Support for Single Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV) to enable
| compute and Graphics workloads in virtualized environments.
| wyre wrote:
| one can upgrade and swap parts with a computer running an Intel
| GPU. Linux is very well supported compared to Mac hardware.
| fvv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Funny, I not sure why anyone would use Apple over Linux.
| protimewaster wrote:
| 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.
| thesmart wrote:
| Because the B70 cards can pipeline 500 tok/s on concurrent
| workloads. Apple Silicon and Nvidia consumer cards only work
| well w/ serial workloads.
| whalesalad wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lostmsu wrote:
| > small fp8 local model with almost 100k token context
|
| Would not fit Qwen3.5 27B would it? That's the SOTA
| robertVance wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Afaik driver support is very complete on Linux. You often see
| Arc GPUs used in media transcoding workloads for that reason.
| HerbManic wrote:
| 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.
| whalesalad wrote:
| quicksync has been around for ages its surprising to me
| that other platorms have not adopted this. no reason a
| modern cpu can't transcode video.
| vel0city wrote:
| Quicksync doesn't do its work on the CPU, it does the
| work on the integrated GPU. Their processors that did not
| have on-board graphics did not have Quicksync support.
| See their P series and many of their Xeon parts which do
| not carry Quicksync support, while the versions with
| integrated graphics do have it.
|
| AMD chips that have integrated GPUs (their APU series of
| chips) often do have support for hardware video encoders.
| Because, once again, its a function of the GPU and not
| the CPU.
| bpye wrote:
| My B580 works fine on Linux. Graphics perf is a bit worse than
| under Windows, but supposedly compute is pretty much the same.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I'm running A-series Arc for media transcoding and it works
| just fine.
| himata4113 wrote:
| Linus Torvalds runs ARC :)
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Still seems crooked to sell a GPU that is already lost their
| driver team and will get no new meaningful updates.
| wtallis wrote:
| Does it _need_ a huge driver team pushing out big updates
| in order to be suitable for the kind of Pro use cases it 's
| targeted at? They're explicitly _not_ going after the
| gaming market so they don 't need to be on the treadmill of
| constant driver updates delivering workarounds and
| optimizations for the latest game releases.
|
| They're still going to be employing _some_ developers for
| driver maintenance for the sake of their iGPUs, and that
| might be enough for these cards.
| staticman2 wrote:
| You are exaggerating, right? They didn't really fire the entire
| Arc team did they? I couldn't find a source saying that.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| 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.
| gk-- wrote:
| ah, so this is MLID. yeah i'll wait for the announcement.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| MLID is a terrible information source.
| chao- wrote:
| You may be a bit too credulous. There has been a "leak" or
| "rumor" that Intel's GPU initiatives are canceled about
| once every three months, for over two years. Yet Intel
| continues to release new SKUs and make new product
| announcements. Just last month they announced a new data
| center GPU product (an inference-focused variant of Jaguar
| Shores).
|
| I can't see the future, but I can see patterns: the media
| that reports straight from the industry rumor mill LOVES
| this "Intel has cancelled its GPUs" story, for whatever
| reason. I have no particular love for Intel (out of my six
| current systems, my only Intel box is a cheap NUC from
| 2018), but at this point, these rumors echo the old joke
| about economists who "accurately predicted the last nine
| out of two recessions".
| thesmart wrote:
| The idea that Intel's foundry could replace TSMC is
| hilarious. No. Maybe a gamer-focused mid-market card based
| on 30-series.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| MLID has been saying Arc was cancelled since before the
| first Alchemist cards were released.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| It does sound like a very Intel choice though.
| pjmlp wrote:
| New cards in 2026, and targeting Vulkan 1.3?!
| tbyehl wrote:
| Where's the A310 / A40 successor? Gimme some SR-IOV in a slot-
| powered, single-width, low-profile card.
| SkyeCA wrote:
| 32GB of vram for a decent price? I wonder if these will work well
| for VR, because vram is my current main issue.
| aruametello wrote:
| (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)
| HerbManic wrote:
| 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.
| jmward01 wrote:
| 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.....
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| jmward01 wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I think speeding up long context and opening up the use of
| models with larger shared layers is ultimately more
| relevant than hosting unused MoE layers. Of course you
| could do that as a last resort, i.e. when running with a
| smaller context that leaves some VRAM free to use.
| mikelitoris wrote:
| Too little too late, classic Intel
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| Any idea if it'll be possible to mix these with nvidia cards?
| Adding 32GB to a single 3090 setup would be pretty nice.
| kadoban wrote:
| 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.
| cmxch wrote:
| 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.
| cmxch wrote:
| 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?
| lostmsu wrote:
| Nothing like Crossfire/SLI? Not possible to efficiently connect
| multiple cards for one large model?
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