A $350 “workstation” GPU with 16 GB of VRAM? I... guess, but is that really enough for the kinds of things that would have you looking for workstation-level GPUs in the first place?
It’s interesting that it uses 4 Display Ports and not a single HDMI.
Is HDMI seen as a “gaming” feature, or is DP seen as a “workstation” interface? Ultimately HDMI is a brand that commands higher royalties than DP, so I suspect this decision was largely chosen to minimize costs. I wonder what percentage of the target audience has HDMI only displays.
Huh, I didn't realize these were just released, I came across it looking for a GPU that had AV1 hardware encoding and been putting a shopping cart together for a mini-ITX xeon server for all my ffmpeg shenanigans.
I like to Buy American when I can but it's hard to find out which fabs various CPUs and GPUs are made in. I read Kingston does some RAM here and Crucial some SSDs. Maybe the silicon is fabbed here but everything I found is "assembled in Taiwan", which made me feel like I should get my dream machine sooner rather than later
It clocks in at 1503.4 samples per second, behind the NVidia RTX 2060 (1590.93 samples / sec, released Jan 2019), AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT (1539, May 2022), and Apple M3 Pro GPU 14 cores (1651.85, Oct 2023).
Note that this perf comparison is just ray-tracing rendering, useful for games, but might give some clarity on performance comparisons with its competition.
>Overall the Intel Arc Pro B50 was at 1.47x the performance of the NVIDIA RTX A1000 with that mix of OpenGL, Vulkan, and OpenCL/Vulkan compute workloads both synthetic and real-world tests. That is just under Intel's own reported Windows figures of the Arc Pro B50 delivering 1.6x the performance of the RTX A1000 for graphics and 1.7x the performance of the A1000 for AI inference. This is all the more impressive when considering the Arc Pro B50 price of $349+ compared to the NVIDIA RTX A1000 at $420+.
The new CEO of Intel has said that Intel is giving up competing with Nvidia.
Why would you bother with any Intel product with an attitude like that, gives zero confidence in the company. What business is Intel in, if not competing with Nvidia and AMD. Is it giving up competing with AMD too?
Kinda bummed that it’s $50 more than originally said. But if it works well, a single slot card that can be powered by the PCIe slot is super valuable. Hoping there will be some affordable prebuilds so I can run some MoE LLM models.
Another advantage of Intel GPU is vGPU SR-IOV, while consumer video cards of NVIDIA and AMD didn't support it. But even the integrated GPU of N100, N97 support it[1],
Therefore I can install Proxmox VE and run multiple VMs, assigning a vGPU to each of them a for video transcoding (IPCam NVR), AI and other applications.
I really hope Intel continues with GPUs or the GPU market is doomed until China catches up, Nvidia produces good products with great software, best in industry really, with great length support, but that doesn't excuse them from monopolistic practices. The fact that AMD refuses to compete really makes it look like this entire thing is organized from the top (US government).
This reminds me a lot of the LLM craze and how they wanted to charge so much for simple usage at the start until China released deepseek. Ideally we shouldn't rely on China but do we have a choice? the entire US economy has become reliant on monopolies to keep their insanely high stock prices and profit margins
Really confused why the Intel and AMD both continue to struggle and yet still refuse to offer what Nvidia wont, i.e. high ram consumer GPUs. I'd much prefer paying 3x cost for 3x VRAM (48GB/$1047), 6x cost for 6x VRAM (96GB/$2094), 12x cost for 12x VRAM (192GB/$4188), etc.
They'd sell like hotcakes and software support would quickly improve.
At 16GB I'd still prefer to pay a premium for NVidia GPUs given its superior ecosystem, I really want to get off NVidia but Intel/AMD isn't giving me any reason to.
It's not competing with amd/nvidia at twice the price on terms of performance, but it's also too expensive for a cheap gaming rig. And then there are people who are happy with integrated graphics.
Maybe I'm just lacking imagination here, I don't do anything fancy on my work and couch laptops and I have a proper gaming PC.
An obvious use case is high-end NVRs. Low power, ample GPU for object detection/tracking, ample encoders for streaming. Should make a good surveillance platform.
With SR-IOV* there is a low cost path for GPU in virtual machines. Until now this has (mostly) been a feature exclusive to costly "enterprise" GPUs. Combine that with the good encoders and some VDI software and you have VM hosted GPU accelerated 3D graphics to remote displays. There are many business use cases for this, and no small number of "home lab" use cases as well.
Linux is a first class citizen with Intel's display products, and B50/60 is no different, so it's a nice choice when you want a GPU accelerated Linux desktop with minimum BS. Given the low cost and power, it could find its way into Steam consoles as well.
Finally, Intel is the scrappy competitor in this space: they are being very liberal with third parties and their designs, unlike the incumbents. We're already seeing this with Maxsun and others.
I really think Intel is on the right track to dethrone both AMD and NVIDIA, while also competing with ARM SoCs. It's fascinating to watch.
Both their integrated and dedicated GPUs have been steadily improving each generation. The Arc line is both cheaper and comparable in performance to more premium NVIDIA cards. The 140T/140V iGPUs do the same to AMD APUs. Their upcoming Panther Lake and Nova Lake architectures seem promising, and will likely push this further. Meanwhile, they're also more power efficient and cooler, to the point where Apple's lead with their ARM SoCs is not far off. Sure, the software ecosystem is not up to par with the competition yet, but that's a much easier problem to solve, and they've been working on that front as well.
I'm holding off on buying a new laptop for a while just to see how this plays out. But I really like how Intel is shaking things up, and not allowing the established players to rest on their laurels.
If you buy Intel Arc cards for their competitive video encoding/decoding capabilities, it appears that all of them are still capped at 8 parallel streams. The "B" series have more headroom at high resolutions and bitrates, on the other hand some "A" series cards need only a single PCIe slot so you can stick more of them into a single server.
I am confused as a lot of comments here seem to argue around gaming, but isn't this supposed to be a workstation card, hence not intended to be used for games? The phoronix review also seems to only focus on computing usage, not gaming.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 47.7 ms ] threadAlso, do these support SR-IOV, as in handing slices of the GPU to virtual machines?
Is HDMI seen as a “gaming” feature, or is DP seen as a “workstation” interface? Ultimately HDMI is a brand that commands higher royalties than DP, so I suspect this decision was largely chosen to minimize costs. I wonder what percentage of the target audience has HDMI only displays.
I like to Buy American when I can but it's hard to find out which fabs various CPUs and GPUs are made in. I read Kingston does some RAM here and Crucial some SSDs. Maybe the silicon is fabbed here but everything I found is "assembled in Taiwan", which made me feel like I should get my dream machine sooner rather than later
It clocks in at 1503.4 samples per second, behind the NVidia RTX 2060 (1590.93 samples / sec, released Jan 2019), AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT (1539, May 2022), and Apple M3 Pro GPU 14 cores (1651.85, Oct 2023).
Note that this perf comparison is just ray-tracing rendering, useful for games, but might give some clarity on performance comparisons with its competition.
>Overall the Intel Arc Pro B50 was at 1.47x the performance of the NVIDIA RTX A1000 with that mix of OpenGL, Vulkan, and OpenCL/Vulkan compute workloads both synthetic and real-world tests. That is just under Intel's own reported Windows figures of the Arc Pro B50 delivering 1.6x the performance of the RTX A1000 for graphics and 1.7x the performance of the A1000 for AI inference. This is all the more impressive when considering the Arc Pro B50 price of $349+ compared to the NVIDIA RTX A1000 at $420+.
Why would you bother with any Intel product with an attitude like that, gives zero confidence in the company. What business is Intel in, if not competing with Nvidia and AMD. Is it giving up competing with AMD too?
Therefore I can install Proxmox VE and run multiple VMs, assigning a vGPU to each of them a for video transcoding (IPCam NVR), AI and other applications.
https://github.com/Upinel/PVE-Intel-vGPU
I would happily buy 96 Gb for $3490, but this makes very little sense.
This reminds me a lot of the LLM craze and how they wanted to charge so much for simple usage at the start until China released deepseek. Ideally we shouldn't rely on China but do we have a choice? the entire US economy has become reliant on monopolies to keep their insanely high stock prices and profit margins
At 16GB I'd still prefer to pay a premium for NVidia GPUs given its superior ecosystem, I really want to get off NVidia but Intel/AMD isn't giving me any reason to.
It's not competing with amd/nvidia at twice the price on terms of performance, but it's also too expensive for a cheap gaming rig. And then there are people who are happy with integrated graphics.
Maybe I'm just lacking imagination here, I don't do anything fancy on my work and couch laptops and I have a proper gaming PC.
With SR-IOV* there is a low cost path for GPU in virtual machines. Until now this has (mostly) been a feature exclusive to costly "enterprise" GPUs. Combine that with the good encoders and some VDI software and you have VM hosted GPU accelerated 3D graphics to remote displays. There are many business use cases for this, and no small number of "home lab" use cases as well.
Linux is a first class citizen with Intel's display products, and B50/60 is no different, so it's a nice choice when you want a GPU accelerated Linux desktop with minimum BS. Given the low cost and power, it could find its way into Steam consoles as well.
Finally, Intel is the scrappy competitor in this space: they are being very liberal with third parties and their designs, unlike the incumbents. We're already seeing this with Maxsun and others.
* Intel has promised this for B50/60 in Q4
Both their integrated and dedicated GPUs have been steadily improving each generation. The Arc line is both cheaper and comparable in performance to more premium NVIDIA cards. The 140T/140V iGPUs do the same to AMD APUs. Their upcoming Panther Lake and Nova Lake architectures seem promising, and will likely push this further. Meanwhile, they're also more power efficient and cooler, to the point where Apple's lead with their ARM SoCs is not far off. Sure, the software ecosystem is not up to par with the competition yet, but that's a much easier problem to solve, and they've been working on that front as well.
I'm holding off on buying a new laptop for a while just to see how this plays out. But I really like how Intel is shaking things up, and not allowing the established players to rest on their laurels.