Intel Announces Arc Pro B70 and Arc Pro B65 GPUs

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Pricing, Specs, and Positioning

  • Both Arc Pro B70 and B65 offer 32 GB VRAM and ~600 GB/s bandwidth, seen as strong on memory for the price.
  • Reported pricing: B70 around $950–$1,000, B65 around $650, with some comparing them favorably to 32 GB NVIDIA cards starting near $4,000 and AMD’s ~32 GB alternatives at ~$1,400.
  • Some characterize B70 as roughly a “70-class” card with extra VRAM, not a top-tier compute monster.
  • Debate over performance: one estimate claimed ~1/10th of a 5090’s INT8 TOPS, later corrected to closer to ~1/2 after accounting for sparsity and FP4 differences and more apples-to-apples comparisons.

AI, Inference, and VRAM Needs

  • Many see 32 GB VRAM at this price as compelling for local LLMs, exploratory work, and long-context models.
  • Others dismiss 32 GB as already inadequate and fantasize about 128–512 GB or even 1 TB VRAM cards, though commenters argue such capacities are currently impractical and would be astronomically expensive.
  • Some users report successful vLLM/intel-xpu setups on Arc Pro for FP8/FP16 models with large contexts, albeit with rough edges and missing features (e.g., FP8 KV cache).
  • Interest in multi-GPU setups and cheap platforms with enough PCIe lanes; suggestions include used server platforms (e.g., EPYC/Threadripper) due to lane count limits on consumer CPUs.

Virtualization and Workstation Use

  • SR-IOV support is a major attraction for VM and virtual workstation workloads.
  • Several see these as viable replacements for older Tesla cards or as cheap inference/virtualization accelerators.
  • Questions arise about mixing Intel and NVIDIA cards in one system; no clear consensus is given.

Linux vs macOS / Apple Silicon

  • Some compare the B70 to Apple’s M-series (e.g., M4 Max) and argue a Mac Studio might be a better value.
  • Counterpoints emphasize Linux as a better server OS, easier hardware modularity, and stronger support for virtualization, containers, and standard PCIe GPUs.
  • macOS is criticized as a server platform: power-management quirks, security restrictions, weaker ecosystem for drivers and filesystems.

Drivers, Stability, and Intel’s GPU Future

  • Multiple users report generally solid Linux support for Arc (especially for media transcoding), with some bugs for LLM workloads.
  • Concern and confusion about reports that Intel laid off much of its Arc and Linux driver teams; some claim future dGPU support is effectively dead, while others point out these are rumor-heavy, recurring claims and note Intel continues to release new GPUs.
  • Some criticize Intel’s timing and past “paper launches,” calling these cards “too little, too late” if availability and long-term support lag.