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Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations
- dale_glass 1y agoWhat about the B60, with the 24GB VRAM? Also, do these support SR-IOV, as in handing slices of the GPU to virtual machines?
- mananaysiempre 1y agoA $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?
- adgjlsfhk1 1y agoThe closest comparable on the Nvidia side is the RTX Pro 2000 which is 16GB vram for $650 (and likely more compute).
- jacquesm 1y agoAnd likely much better support for that compute.
- bitmasher9 1y agoIt’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.
- cjbconnor 1y ago4x Mini DP is common for low profile workstation cards, see the Quadro P1000, T1000, Radeon Pro WX 4100, etc.
- klodolph 1y agoThis is the right answer. I see a bunch of people talking about licensing fees for HDMI, but when you’re plugging in 4 monitors it’s really nice to only use one type of cable. If you’re only using one type of cable, it’s gonna be DP.
- accrual 1y agoYeah, I recall even old Quadro cards in early Core era hardware often had quad mini DisplayPort.
- zh3 1y agoYou can also get GT730's with 4xHDMI - not fast, but great for office work and display/status boards type scenarios. Single slot passive design too, so you can stack several in a single PC. Currently just £63 UK each. [0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASUS-GT730-4H-SL-2GD5-GeForce-multi-monitor-productivity/dp/B09DVN7QWH?th=1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASUS-GT730-4H-SL-2GD5-GeForce-multi...
- kasabali 1y agoIt's unbelievable that piece of shit is still selling for a ridiculous price.
- dale_glass 1y agoHDMI requires paying license fees. DP is an open standard.
- mananaysiempre 1y agoAs far as things I care about go, the HDMI Forum’s overt hostility[1] to open-source drivers is the important part, but it would indeed be interesting to know what Intel cared about there. (Note that some self-described “open” standards are not royalty-free, only RAND-licensed by somebody’s definiton of “R” and “ND”. And some don’t have their text available free of charge, either, let alone have a development process open to all comers. I believe the only thing the phrase “open standard” reliably implies at this point is that access to the text does not require signing an NDA. DisplayPort in particular is royalty-free—although of course with patents you can never really know—while legal access to the text is gated[2] behind a VESA membership with dues based on the company revenue—I can’t find the official formula, but Wikipedia claims $5k/yr minimum.) [1] https://hackaday.com/2023/07/11/displayport-a-better-video-interface/ https://hackaday.com/2023/07/11/displayport-a-better-video-i... [2] https://vesa.org/vesa-standards/ https://vesa.org/vesa-standards/
- jazzyjackson 1y agoHuh, 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
- Havoc 1y agoIf you don't need it for AI shenanigans then you're better off with the smaller arcs for under a 100...they can do av1 too
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoI don't know how big the impact really is, but Intel is pretty far behind on encoder quality mostly. Oh wait, on most codecs they are pretty far behind, but av1 they seem pretty competitive? Neat. Apologies for the video link. But a recent pretty in depth comparison: https://youtu.be/kkf7q4L5xl8 https://youtu.be/kkf7q4L5xl8
- bane 1y agoYou may want to check that your Xeon may already support hardware encoding of AV1 in the iGPU. I saved a bundle building a media server when I realized the iGPU was more than sufficient (and more efficient) than chucking a GPU in the case. I have a service that runs continuously and reencodes any videos I have into h265 and the iGPU barely even notices it.
- jeffbee 1y agoWhat recent Xeon has the iGPU? Didn't they stop including them ~5 years ago?
- jazzyjackson 1y agoLooks like Core Ultra is the only chip with integrated Arc GPU with AV1 encode. The Xeon series I was looking at, the 1700 socket so the e2400s, definitely don't have iGPU. (The fact that the motherboard I'm looking at only has VGA is probably a clue xD) I'll have to consider pros and cons with Ultra chips, thanks for the tip.
- Havoc 1y agoGood pricing for 16gb vram. Can see that finding a use for some home servers.
- samspenc 1y agoNot bad with 16 GB VRAM, a bit disappointing on performance though, looking at the Blender 3D (open source) benchmarks: https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=OPTIX&compute_type=CUDA&compute_type=HIP&compute_type=METAL&compute_type=ONEAPI&group_by=device_name&blender_version=4.5.0 https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=... 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.
- adgjlsfhk1 1y agoIt wouldn't surprise me if there was 10-20% perf improvement in drivers/software for this. Intel's architecture is pretty new and nothing is optimized for it yet.
- bee_rider 1y agoIs that a comparison of the raytracing fixed function hardware for the various GPUs, or is it a GPGPU comparison?
- Ekaros 1y agoI think note there against 2060 and 6750 XT is power efficiency. About half or quarter of TDP...
- tester756 1y agohttps://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-pro-b50-linux https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-pro-b50-linux >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+.
- colechristensen 1y ago#3 player just released something that compares well with price/performace ratio compared to #1 player's release from a year and a half ago... yep
- tossandthrow 1y ago... At a current day cheaper price. There are huge markets that does not care about SOTA performance metrics but needs to get a job done.
- blagie 1y agoWell, no. It doesn't. The comparison is to the A1000. Toss in a 5060 Ti into the compare table, and we're in an entirely different playing field. There are reasons to buy the workstation NVidia cards over the consumer ones, but those mostly go away when looking at something like the new Intel. Unless one is in an exceptionally power-constrained environment, yet has room for a full-sized card (not SFF or laptop), I can't see a time the B50 would even be in the running against a 5060 Ti, 4060 Ti, or even 3060 Ti.
- magicalhippo 1y ago> There are reasons to buy the workstation NVidia cards over the consumer ones I seem to recall certain esoteric OpenGL things like lines being fast was a NVIDIA marketing differentiator, as only certain CAD packages or similar cared about that. Is this still the case, or has that software segment moved on now?
- wewewedxfgdf 1y agoThe 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?
- ryao 1y agoI thought that he said that they gave up at competing with Nvidia at training, not in general. He left the door open to compete on inference. Did he say otherwise more recently?
- mathnode 1y agoBecause we don't need data centre hardware to run domestic software.
- grg0 1y agoZero confidence why? Market segments exist. I want hardware that I can afford and own, not AI/datacenter crap that is useless to me.
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoNVIDIA cards are unironically over $3,500 at the store in some cases...
- SadTrombone 1y agoAMD has also often said that they can't compete with Nvidia at the high end, and as the other commenter said: market segments exist. Not everyone needs a 5090. If anything, people are starved for options in the budget/mid-range market, which is where Intel could pick up a solid chunk of market share.
- pshirshov 1y agoRegardless of what they say, they CAN compete in training and inference, there is literally no alternative to W7900 at the moment. That's 4080 performance with 48Gb VRAM for half of what similar CUDA devices would costs.
- syntaxing 1y agoKinda 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.
- jeffbee 1y agoCompeting workstation cards like the RTX A2000 also do not need power connectors.
- syntaxing 1y ago"competing" means 12GB of VRAM at a 600ish price point though...
- mrheosuper 1y agoAm i missing anything ?, because it looks like a double slot GPU.
- ytch 1y agoAnother 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. https://github.com/Upinel/PVE-Intel-vGPU https://github.com/Upinel/PVE-Intel-vGPU
- jaggs 1y agoHow does it compare to an RTX 5060 ti with 16 gigabytes of VRAM?
- shrubble 1y agoWith the power being 70W from the connector only, how feasible is it to have 3 per server and have effectively 48GB VRAM for tasks?
- addisonj 1y agoI think the answer to that right now is highly workload dependent. From what I have seen, it is improving rapidly, but still very early days for the software stack compared to Nvidia
- adgjlsfhk1 1y agoYou're probably better off with the incoming B60 which has 24GB vram.
- syntaxing 1y agoThere’s a 48GB B60 already [1] but it’s definitely a significant amount more than 3X B50 pro (you obviously get way better performance). [1] https://www.maxsun.com/products/intel-arc-pro-b60-dual-48g-turbo https://www.maxsun.com/products/intel-arc-pro-b60-dual-48g-t...
- kadoban 1y ago> There’s a 48GB B60 already Kind of. It's more two 24gb b60s in a trenchcoat. It connects to one slot but it's two completely separate gpus and requires the board to support pcie bifurcation.
- magicalhippo 1y ago> and requires the board to support pcie bifurcation And lanes. My board has two PCIe x16 slots fed by the CPU, but if I use both they'll only get x8 lanes each. Thus if I plugged two of these in there, I'd still only have two working GPUs, not four.
- cmxch 1y agoNo good if the cost is identical to a 5090.
- jacquesm 1y agoHow is the software support side for AI work with this card?
- pshirshov 1y ago> 16 GB of GDDR6 VRAM I would happily buy 96 Gb for $3490, but this makes very little sense.
- kev009 1y agoIs there a way to get acceptable performance out of these without resizable BAR now? To retromod older business desktops.
- arresin 1y ago> 224 GB/s of effective bandwidth
- mixmastamyk 1y agoCompact? Looks about a foot long and two slots wide. Not abnormal but not what I’d call compact either.
- lanthade 1y agoAgreed. I have an A40 GPU in an epyc system right now specifically because it's a single slot card. I did not pay for gobs of PCIE expansion in this system just to block slots with double wide GPUs. Sure it can't do the heavy lift of some beefier cards but there is a need for single space cards still.
- daemonologist 1y agoIt's half-height (fits in "slim" desktops, those media center PCs, and in a 2U server without having to turn it sideways/use a riser), and barely longer than the PCIe socket. Phoronix has a picture with a full-height bracket which maybe gives a better point of comparison: https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-pro-b50-linux https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-pro-b50-linux (A half-height single-slot card would be even smaller, but those are vanishingly rare these days. This is pretty much as small as GPUs get unless you're looking more for a "video adapter" than a GPU.)
- mixmastamyk 1y agoOh IC, the blue one is half height.
- dev1ycan 1y agoI 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
- donkeybeer 1y agoDo you think family relations between the ceos is a factor or thats not rlevant?
- dev1ycan 1y agoI don't think it matters really, this is a thing happening at all levels in US corporations, it's like an organized mob, and the godfather being the US government itself, as it's the primary beneficiary, just look at the Boeing "accidents" for whistleblowers, that should be all the evidence anyone needs.
- mythz 1y agoReally 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.
- doctorpangloss 1y agothey don't manufacture RAM, so none of the margin goes to them
- nullc 1y agoEven if they put out some super high memory models and just pass the ram through at cost it would increase sales -- potentially quite dramatically and increase their total income a lot and have a good chance of transitioning to being a market leader rather than an also-ran. AMD has lagged so long because of the software ecosystem but the climate now is that they'd only need to support a couple popular model architectures to immediately grab a lot of business. The failure to do so is inexplicable. I expect we will eventually learn that this was about yet another instance of anti-competitive collusion.
- doctorpangloss 1y agothe whole RAM industry was twice sanctioned for price fixing, so I agree: any business that deals with RAM has, more likely than other industries by a lot, anti-competitive collusion
- zargon 1y ago> The failure to do so is inexplicable. Lisa and Jensen are cousins. I think that explains it. Lisa can easily prove me wrong by releasing a high-memory GPU that significantly undercuts Nvidia's RTX 6000 Pro.
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- sharts 1y agoThe upside with this is support for SR-IOV
- wink 1y agoI really wonder who this is for? 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.
- ryukoposting 1y agoLast time I had anything to do with the low-mid range pro GPU world, the use case was 3D CAD and certain animation tasks. That was ~10 years ago, though.
- hackerfoo 1y agoI’m interested in putting one of these in a server because of the relatively low power usage and compact size.
- askl 1y agoWhy would you need a dedicated graphics card in a server? Usually you wouldn't even have a monitor connected.
- imtringued 1y agoSome people are tired of rendering everything on the CPU via AVX.
- akaij 1y agoMy guess would be video encoding/decoding and rendering.
- shellwizard 1y agoSome Intel and AMD CPU come with an iGPU that you can use to transcode videos even some Xeons, there's no need to add a GPU just for that
- imiric 1y agoI 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.
- Tepix 1y agoIf 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.
- littlecranky67 1y agoI 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.
- DrNosferatu 1y agoNow launch models with 32GB and 64GB VRAM for those fat LLMs.
- Alifatisk 1y agoA feature I haven't seen someone comment about yet is Project Battlematrix [1][2] with these cards, this allows for multi-GPU AI orchestration. A feature Nvidia offers for enterprise AI workloads (Run:ai), but Intel is bringing this to consumers 1. https://youtu.be/iM58i3prTIU?si=JnErLQSHpxU-DlPP&t=225 https://youtu.be/iM58i3prTIU?si=JnErLQSHpxU-DlPP&t=225 2. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/introduction-project-battlematrix.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...
- nottorp 1y ago... but how's video game compatibility with Intel these days? I have this cool and quiet fetish so 70 W is making me extremely interested. IF it also works as a gaming GPU.
- Tepix 1y agoWhen will we see Intel Flex datacenter cards that do not have the 8 stream limit based on the Xe2 "battlemage" architecture? All current Intel Flex cards seem to be based on the previous gen "Xe".
- solardev 1y agoWill Intel even be around in a few years to support this thing, especially in software? They seem to be in their death spasms...
- altcognito 1y agoIntel is doing poorly, but I believe Apple was in much, much worse shape than this in the early 2000's. AMD was also in much, much worse shape that this. Intel has many, many solid customers at the government, enterprise and consumer levels. They will be around.
- solardev 1y agoWasn't that before the era of hyperscalers? Intel offers nothing of value anymore. What's to stop one for the giants from just swallowing them up like 3dfx or ATI?
- altcognito 1y agoThey sell a lot to the hyperscalers as well, suggesting they offer something of value. I don't think anything prevents them from being swallowed up, but I'm not sure of what value that would be to a hyperscaler unless they want to get into the chip making business.
- kadoban 1y ago> Intel is doing poorly, but I believe Apple was in much, much worse shape than this in the early 2000's. AMD was also in much, much worse shape that this. Were they really? I don't think Intel is going anywhere any time soon either, but damn do they seem in bad shape. AMD, didn't they just have lackluster products for a few years and they were kind of the scrappy budget underdogs? I don't recall their fate seeming so...hopeless.
- iamleppert 1y ago16 GB? What a joke!
- bfrog 1y agoI'm glad Intel is continuing to make GPUs, really. But ultimately it seems like an uphill battle against a very entrenched monopoly with a software and community moat that was built up over nearly 20 years at this point. I wonder what it will take to break through.
- srmatto 1y agoGPUs prices really surprise me. Most PC part prices have remained the same over the decades with storage and RAM actually getting cheaper. GPUs however have gotten extremely expensive. $350 used to get you a really good GPU about 20 years ago, I think top of the line was around $450-500--now it only gets you entry level. Top of the line is now $1500+!
- guluarte 1y agoall thanks to crypto and AI
- jeroenhd 1y agoCryptocurrency, NFTs, and AI ruined the GPU market.
- HDThoreaun 1y agoDatacenter gpu margins are 80%+. Consumer margins are like 25%. Any company with a datacenter product that sells out is just going to put all their fab allocation toward that and ignore the consumer segment. Plus these companies are really worried about their consumer products being used in datacenters and consuming their money maker so they kneecap the consumer vram to make sure that doesnt happen