(Image credit: Intel) (Image credit: Intel) Intel positions the B70 against Nvidia's $1,800 RTX Pro 4000 24GB, the second-cheapest Blackwell workstation card so far, and highlights the B70's advantages against that product for larger context windows and time-to-first-token latency for large numbers of concurrent users.
Intel mostly charts its wins against the RTX Pro 4000 using models with BF16 quantizations, whose higher potential accuracy might be desirable in some use cases but also obscures the Blackwell card's potential performance advantages with increasingly popular lower-precision data types like Nvidia's own NVFP4. The XMX matrix acceleration of Battlemage only extends down to FP16 and INT8 data types, while Blackwell supports a much wider range of reduced-precision formats.
Intel also highlights the multi-GPU support of its software stack, which lets interested parties scale up LLM serving across multiple Arc Pro cards to increase memory capacity for larger context windows, larger models, or both.
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Intel further emphasizes the advantages of its platform for cost-per-token across a range of models, and indeed, at $949 apiece, any number of Arc Pro B70s would ring in for less than the $1,800 RTX Pro 4000. Any tokens you get out of a B70 will naturally be cheaper by that math. The Arc Pro B70 also undercuts AMD's $,1299 Radeon AI Pro R9700, which until now has been another relatively cheap way to get to 32GB on a local AI card.
But it's worth noting that Nvidia has several other RTX Pro cards above the RTX Pro 4000 in its lineup that allow AI systems architects to precisely tailor memory and compute requirements to given workloads, so it might not always be necessary for those folks to spread workloads across multiple cards this way. And that same breadth of offerings means that those working with Nvidia server GPUs can scale up the capabilities of those systems further than Intel's product stack currently allows.
Nvidia and its partners have also long been in the business of selling eight-GPU servers, while Intel didn't highlight configurations extending beyond four GPUs in its presentation.
It's also worth remembering that hardware alone does not an AI system make, as our own local AI experiments have demonstrated. Nvidia's CUDA moat remains wide, and buyers considering an Arc Pro-powered solution would need to account for the potential time and costs involved in handling issues of application support and stability on Intel's platform.
For intrepid AI explorers undeterred by potentially choppy software seas, the relatively low cost of entry on Intel's platform for organizations just trying to spin up an experimental on-premise AI server for local usage might be appealing. But more seasoned AI developers working with an eye toward scaling up their applications both locally and in the cloud will likely want to stick with systems built around Nvidia's offerings for reasons of compatibility, scalability, and TCO.
It remains to be seen whether Intel will ever deploy big Battlemage for gaming, but given the current silicon and memory supply crunch and the midrange performance ballpark where this GPU might land for gaming, it seems unlikely that Intel could sell a gaming-first version of this card profitably.
The AI and professional markets allow for higher prices and better margins, and given CEO Lip-Bu Tan's stated goals for the company, we expect that's where bigger Battlemage will stay. But anything could happen in today's crazy tech landscape.
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As the Senior Analyst, Graphics at Tom's Hardware, Jeff Kampman covers everything to do with GPUs, gaming performance, and more. From integrated graphics processors to discrete graphics cards to the hyperscale installations powering our AI future, if it's got a GPU in it, Jeff is on it.\u00a0 ","contributorText":"With contributions from","contributors":[{"name":"Andrew E. Freedman","link":{"href":"https:\/\/www.tomshardware.com\/author\/andrew-e-freedman"}}],"collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-19/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Jeffrey Kampman Senior Analyst, Graphics As the Senior Analyst, Graphics at Tom's Hardware, Jeff Kampman covers everything to do with GPUs, gaming performance, and more. From integrated graphics processors to discrete graphics cards to the hyperscale installations powering our AI future, if it's got a GPU in it, Jeff is on it.
Gururu I know all the previous BM cards sold like hot cakes but it has always escaped me who these professional cards are targeting. Who would be an ideal consumer for a B70? What sort of work product? Reply
COLGeek Just a general comment, in my experience, workstation GPUs actually game quite well, en par with their consumer GPU equivalents. This is largely true with Nvidia and AMD offerings, I suspect these Intel GPUs will as well, even if not marketed with gaming in mind. I have a B580 in a system. It continues to perform rather well. Reply
cyrusfox Gururu said: I know all the previous BM cards sold like hot cakes but it has always escaped me who these professional cards are targeting. Who would be an ideal consumer for a B70? What sort of work product? Offline LLM, this has enough memory you can have a high accuracy model running. Enough speed that it isn't painfully slow(like it is on my lunar lake laptop doing cpu LLM work). Reply
Notton 300W is around the predicted B770 power consumption. I wonder how well it can game? Reply
usertests B60 24GB sells at $650-750, above the $600 MSRP. B70 32GB will sell out fast at $950. I understand why the B65 exists, but it's a very heavy cut to cores. Reply
Jeff Kampman COLGeek said: Just a general comment, in my experience, workstation GPUs actually game quite well, en par with their consumer GPU equivalents. This is largely true with Nvidia and AMD offerings, I suspect these Intel GPUs will as well, even if not marketed with gaming in mind. I have a B580 in a system. It continues to perform rather well. The B70 will surely run games just fine, but the $950 price tag makes it silly for that purpose. The distinction in the headline is more about that economic reality than any technical limitation. FWIW, the theoretical raw compute throughput of the B70 puts it in the ballpark of the RTX 4060 Ti for games, which is nothing to sniff at, but delivered performance will likely be lower than that card in practice due to Battlemage-specific challenges with utilization. And that's with a ~300W TDP versus the 4060 Ti's ~160W. Anybody who actually wants to game (versus doing it as a party trick on their workstation card) will surely be happier with a cheaper and more modern GPU. Reply
bit_user COLGeek said: Just a general comment, in my experience, workstation GPUs actually game quite well, en par with their consumer GPU equivalents. This is largely true with Nvidia and AMD offerings, I suspect these Intel GPUs will as well, even if not marketed with gaming in mind. A key difference between this and most workstation cards is that this has no gaming equivalent. Most workstation cards are pretty much just a down-clocked version of a gaming card, with a longer warranty, sometimes a thinner form factor, and often also with double the RAM. But, the fact that a gaming card exists that's built around the same GPU means the gaming driver stack is tuned and tested for it. That's why I wonder how well the Pro B70 will run gaming workloads. Not that I'd get one, even if it was competent at that. I had been considering the non-pro equivalent, but it would need to cost no more than about half as much. Anyway, since I didn't think they were going ahead with it, I already got a RTX 5070 when they were selling below MSRP, last year. Reply
COLGeek Jeff Kampman said: The B70 will surely run games just fine, but the $950 price tag makes it silly for that purpose. The distinction in the headline is more about that economic reality than any technical limitation. Agreed, the price is a lot, but you don't buy a workstation class card for gaming (as its main use). You purchase for a professional/technical use, that can game fairly well when needed. @bit_user makes a good point regarding these specific models in terms of consumer equivalents (or lack thereof). That is why I made a general comment. Reply
cyrusfox usertests said: B60 24GB sells at $650-750, above the $600 MSRP. B70 32GB will sell out fast at $950. I understand why the B65 exists, but it's a very heavy cut to cores. Was surprised to find the B50 going for $370 from B&H, I am tempted by the B70, for a private offline LLM project. Now whether to pair with the 13900 on hand or upgrade to the 279k plus is what I am debating (that and how to source DDR5…). Excited by the announcement, don't expect stellar gaming performance, but should do at least as well as the B580, Expect RTX5070 performance personally, unoptimized. I don't play anything current (when I play at all). Reply
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