Today, Intel has significantly expanded its Arc B-series video card lineup with the launch of two new Arc Pro graphics cards, the Arc Pro B70 and Arc Pro B65. In addition to Intel’s existing Arc Pro B-series video cards, Intel’s latest card is also the company’s most powerful card to date, setting significant new records in performance and memory capacity for Intel’s Arc graphics series. The latter point is especially important given the target workstation users. Intel offers 32GB of VRAM on both cards, so the company positions them as a more budget-friendly option for AI developers than competing cards from NVIDIA and AMD.
The Arc Pro B70 and Arc Pro B65 are Intel’s new mid- to high-end Champion cards aimed at the professional market. Strictly speaking, these cards are designed for both graphics work and GPU/AI computing. But to be realistic at a time when the demand for AI hardware seems insatiable, Intel is pitching these cards first and foremost to the AI market.
big battle mage
Under the hood, both of these cards are based on Intel’s previously elusive “Big Battlemage” GPU (also known as BMG-G31), which is Intel’s largest Battlemage architecture configuration. While the G31 itself brings no new features to the Arc Pro family, it is a larger and more powerful GPU than the G21 GPU used in Intel’s other discrete products, delivering higher performance in virtually every aspect.
On the compute side, the G31 scales Battlemage up to 32 Xe cores and 32 ray tracing units. All of these are enabled on the Arc Pro B70, while the Arc Pro B65 gets 20 cores. On the other hand, both of the new Arc Pro video cards can take full advantage of the memory that can be paired with the GPU. This is 32 GB of GDDR6 memory connected to a 256-bit memory bus and running at 19 Gbps, or a total memory bandwidth of 608 GB/s. Since these are Pro cards, they also have Intel’s workstation-grade features, such as support for (soft) ECC memory and support for SR-IOV, which is likely to be of particular interest to homelab users.
In terms of power usage, both cards are rated to draw around a few hundred watts of power. Intel’s reference Arc Pro B70 card has a 230W TDP rating, while AIB partner cards can be configured between 160W and 290W. On the other hand, the single design point for the Arc Pro B65 without an Intel reference card is 200W.
Overall, the memory capacity of these cards is probably Intel’s biggest strength at the moment. As a result, Intel is looking to help sell these cards. NVIDIA and AMD have deeper product stacks and more powerful cards overall, but their 32GB Pro cards start at $1,350 and $3,000, respectively, leaving Intel’s $949 B70 well-positioned as a budget-friendly offering and the B65 even cheaper.
Competitive positioning: More memory for more AI
Leveraging its memory capacity advantage, Intel is pushing its new Arc Pro cards hard for the AI market. The AI market has been in high demand for the highest capacity cards for many years. As Intel believes, having the advantage in memory capacity could provide a significant advantage in AI inference performance by allowing larger models and larger context windows to be stored locally on the card.
However, computing performance outside of memory-constrained scenarios will be a bit more complex. In theory, with a peak theoretical throughput of 367 TOPS at INT8 (non-sparse) precision, Intel is more than competitive on an equal precision basis. However, the Battlemage architecture lacks FP4 support (a limitation shared by AMD). This means that Intel will not be able to match NVIDIA’s low-precision throughput, a feature that NVIDIA has invested heavily in this generation. As a result, Intel remains in some ways on the outside looking in.
In any case, within the Intel ecosystem, the new Arc Pro cards should be a significant advance over mid-tier cards. Under SPECviewperf 15, Arc Pro B70 achieved a 38% improvement in geomean average performance and 69% improvement in peak performance compared to the existing Arc Pro B60. This is well in line with what you would expect from a larger, more capable Battlemage GPU.
In addition to the performance offered by individual Arc Pro video cards, Intel is also counting on multi-GPU scalability to make the cards even better than the competition. 32 GB of VRAM per card means you can pool them as a group of accelerators with 128 GB of VRAM. This is the magic number for running larger versions of multiple inference models. Of course, there is also room for a larger context window.
Partners, pricing, and availability
Somewhat unexpectedly for the smallest high-end workstation card of the three vendors, Intel has lined up a sizeable partner offering their own version of the Arc Pro B70 alongside Intel’s reference card. With the Arc Pro B65, Intel is leaving everything to its partners. This means that all B65 cards on the market will be manufactured by our partners. ARKN, ASRock, Gunnir, Maxsun, and Sparkle are all set to release new Arc Pro cards.
Officially, the Arc Pro B70 is scheduled to go on sale today. But looking around, Newegg is taking card orders starting today, but shipping from retailers won’t start until next Thursday. Meanwhile, the Arc Pro B65 release date is loose, with Intel saying the card will be available from mid-April.
Similarly, Intel’s reference card anchor price for the B70 is $950 (AIB is free to set its own price), but Intel has not provided official pricing guidance for the B65. That will be for AIB to decide. The Arc Pro B60 currently sells for $660, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see the B65 card cost in the $700-$800 range, especially since it has the same 32GB of VRAM as the flagship B70.
Expect more information about these cards to be released in the coming weeks as the series begins shipping and the B65 cards are announced.
