Overview
- Intel's Arc Pro B70, which went on sale Wednesday, starts at $949 with partner cards from ARKN, ASRock, Gunnir, Maxsun, and Sparkle, while the 32GB B65 is slated for mid-April.
- The flagship B70 uses the full BMG-G31 with 32 Xe2 cores, 256 XMX engines, and 32 RT units, pairing 32GB of 19 Gbps GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus for 608 GB/s to fit larger language models and longer prompts on the card.
- The B65 keeps 32GB of GDDR6 but trims compute to 20 Xe2 cores and 160 XMX engines for up to 197 INT8 TOPS, using a 192-bit memory bus to serve cost-conscious inference builds.
- Intel touts bigger context windows, faster multi-user replies, and better tokens-per-dollar than Nvidia’s $1,800 RTX Pro 4000, though the figures come from Intel’s own tests and may differ under Nvidia’s lower-precision formats and mature CUDA ecosystem.
- The cards target pro apps and local AI rather than gaming, with Windows and Linux drivers, oneAPI support, XMX acceleration, and multi-GPU scaling, and reviewers are now looking to validate performance, driver stability, and scale-out fit.