8 ms·

https://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

https://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 ago
  Well, 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?
    - blagie 1y ago
      I don't know the full set of differentiators. For me (not quite at the A1000 level, but just above -- still in the prosumer price range), a major one is ECC. Thermals and size are a bit better too, but I don't see that as $500 better. I actually don't see (m)any meaningful reasons to step up to an Ax000 series if you don't need ECC, but I'd love to hear otherwise.
- KeplerBoy 1y ago
  "release from a year and a half ago", that's technically true but a really generous assessment of the situation. We could just as well compare it to the slightly more capable RTX A2000, which was released more than 4 years ago. Either way, Intel is competing with the EoL Ampere architecture.
- tinco 1y ago
  No. The A1000 was well over $500 last year. This is the #3 player coming out with a card that's a better deal than what the #1 player currently has to offer. I don't get why there's people trying to twist this story or come up with strawmen like the A2000 or even the RTX5000 series. Intel's coming into this market competitively, which as far as I know is a first, and it's also impressive. Coming into the gaming GPU market had always been too ambitious a goal for Intel, they should have started with competing in the professional GPU market. It's well known that Nvidia and AMD have always been price gouging this market so it's fairly easy to enter it competitively. If they can enter this market successfully and then work their way up on the food chain then that seems like good way to recover from their initial fiasco.
  - colechristensen 1y ago
    NVIDIA is looking for profit, Intel is looking for market share, the pricing reflects this. Of course your product looks favorable to something released April 2024 when you're cutting pricing to get more attention.
    - apwell23 1y ago
      helps to be funded by govt that doesn't care about profits
bsder 1y ago
Put 32GB on that card and everybody would ignore performance issues. With 16GB everybody will just call it another in the long list of Intel failures.
- snowram 1y ago
  I wonder why everyone keep saying "just put more VRAM" yet no cards seem to do that. If it is that easy to compete with Nvidia, why don't we already have those cards?
  - blkhawk 1y ago
    because the cards already sell at very very good prices with 16GB and optimizations in generative AI is bringing down memory requirements. Optimizing profits means yyou sell with the least amount of VRAM possible not only to save the direct cost of the RAM but also to guard future profit and your other market segments. the cost of the ram itself is almost nothing compared to that. any intel competitor can more easily release products with more than 16GB and smoke them. Intel tries for a market segment that was only served by gaming cards twice as expensive up until now. this frees those up to be finally sold at MSRP.
    - betimsl 1y ago
      Right, but Intel is in no position to do that. So, they could play and put 32GB VRAM and also, why not produce one with 64GB just for kicks?
      - Workaccount2 1y ago
        If intel was serious about staging a comeback, they would release a 64GB card. But intel is still lost in it's hubris, and still thinks it's a serious player and "one of the boys", so it doesn't seem like they want to break the line.
  - rocqua 1y ago
    I believe that VRAM has massively shot up in price, so this is where a large part of the costs are. Besides I wouldn't be very surprised if Nvidia has such strong market share they can effectively tell suppliers to not let others sell high capacity cards. Especially because VRAM suppliers might worry about ramping up production too much and then being left with an oversupply situation.
moffkalast 1y ago
> 1.7x the performance of the A1000 for AI inference That's a bold claim when their acceleration software (IPEX) is barely maintained and incompatible with most inference stacks, and their Vulkan driver is far behind it in performance.
swiftcoder 1y ago
IIRC, the RTX A1000 is an RTX 3050 8GB with ~10% of the shader cores disabled, retailing for double the price of a 3050? I guess it's a boon for Intel that NVidia repeatedly shoots their own workstation GPUs in the foot...
- eYrKEC2 1y ago
  They may not be disabling them maliciously -- they may be "binning" them -- running tests on the parts and then fusing off/disabling broken pieces of the silicon in order to avoid throwing away a chip that mostly works.
  - swiftcoder 1y ago
    Yep, that's likely the case - but they still charge double for the reduced-performance binned chip, just because it's a "professional" GPU (which, last I heard, really just means it can use the pro variant of the GPU drivers)
    - derefr 1y ago
      Funny enough, maybe the fusing itself (if they go a bit above-and-beyond on it) is exactly why it is a pro model. I.e. maybe Nvidia say "if we're going to fuse some random number of cores such that this is no longer a 3050, then let's not only fuse the damaged cores, but also do a long burn-in pass to observe TDP, and then fuse the top 10% of cores by measured TDP." If they did that, it would mean that the resulting processor would be much more stable under a high duty cycle load, and so likely to last much longer in an inference-cluster deploy environment. And the extra effort (= bottlenecking their supply of this model at the QC step) would at least partially justify the added cost. Since there'd really be no other way to produce a card with as many FLOPS/watt-dollar, without doing this expensive "make the chip so tiny it's beyond the state-of-the-art to make it stably, then analyze it long enough to precision-disable everything required to fully stabilize it for long-term operation" approach.
zamadatix 1y ago
Comparing price to performance in this space might not make much sense as it would seem. One of the (very few) interesting qualities in the A1000 is that it's single slot, low profile, workstation GPU. Intel kept the "powered by the PCIe slot" aspect, but made it dual slot and full height. Needing a "workstation" GPU in a tiny form factor (i.e. not meant to slot and power full sized GPUs) was something one could squeeze on price for, but the only selling point of this is the price.
- tizio13 1y ago
  I think you might be mistaken on the height of the card, if you look at the ports they are mini-DP on a low profile bracket. The picture also states that it includes both types of brackets.
  - zamadatix 1y ago
    Great catch, Serve The Home has a stacked picture of the two cards and they are indeed both low profile https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/NVIDIA-RTX-A1000-8GB-atop-Intel-Arc-Pro-B50-2.jpg https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/NVID.... If your SFF box/1u server has a 2-thick NIC slot it may well be great for that use case then!
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
  Theoretically, they should be able to launch something more competitive in that form-factor next year, though, right?
  - zamadatix 1y ago
    With this wattage I'm not sure why they went double slot in this generation. Maybe they thought having a few dB more silence was a more unique placement for the card or something. The thickness of a GPU largely comes from the cooler, everything else typically fits under the height of the display connectors, and this GPU could certainly work with a single slot cooler.
- 1y ago

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 ago
Well, 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?
  - blagie 1y ago
    I don't know the full set of differentiators. For me (not quite at the A1000 level, but just above -- still in the prosumer price range), a major one is ECC. Thermals and size are a bit better too, but I don't see that as $500 better. I actually don't see (m)any meaningful reasons to step up to an Ax000 series if you don't need ECC, but I'd love to hear otherwise.
KeplerBoy 1y ago
"release from a year and a half ago", that's technically true but a really generous assessment of the situation. We could just as well compare it to the slightly more capable RTX A2000, which was released more than 4 years ago. Either way, Intel is competing with the EoL Ampere architecture.
tinco 1y ago
No. The A1000 was well over $500 last year. This is the #3 player coming out with a card that's a better deal than what the #1 player currently has to offer. I don't get why there's people trying to twist this story or come up with strawmen like the A2000 or even the RTX5000 series. Intel's coming into this market competitively, which as far as I know is a first, and it's also impressive. Coming into the gaming GPU market had always been too ambitious a goal for Intel, they should have started with competing in the professional GPU market. It's well known that Nvidia and AMD have always been price gouging this market so it's fairly easy to enter it competitively. If they can enter this market successfully and then work their way up on the food chain then that seems like good way to recover from their initial fiasco.
- colechristensen 1y ago
  NVIDIA is looking for profit, Intel is looking for market share, the pricing reflects this. Of course your product looks favorable to something released April 2024 when you're cutting pricing to get more attention.
  - apwell23 1y ago
    helps to be funded by govt that doesn't care about profits

bsder 1y ago

Put 32GB on that card and everybody would ignore performance issues. With 16GB everybody will just call it another in the long list of Intel failures.

snowram 1y ago
I wonder why everyone keep saying "just put more VRAM" yet no cards seem to do that. If it is that easy to compete with Nvidia, why don't we already have those cards?
- blkhawk 1y ago
  because the cards already sell at very very good prices with 16GB and optimizations in generative AI is bringing down memory requirements. Optimizing profits means yyou sell with the least amount of VRAM possible not only to save the direct cost of the RAM but also to guard future profit and your other market segments. the cost of the ram itself is almost nothing compared to that. any intel competitor can more easily release products with more than 16GB and smoke them. Intel tries for a market segment that was only served by gaming cards twice as expensive up until now. this frees those up to be finally sold at MSRP.
  - betimsl 1y ago
    Right, but Intel is in no position to do that. So, they could play and put 32GB VRAM and also, why not produce one with 64GB just for kicks?
    - Workaccount2 1y ago
      If intel was serious about staging a comeback, they would release a 64GB card. But intel is still lost in it's hubris, and still thinks it's a serious player and "one of the boys", so it doesn't seem like they want to break the line.
- rocqua 1y ago
  I believe that VRAM has massively shot up in price, so this is where a large part of the costs are. Besides I wouldn't be very surprised if Nvidia has such strong market share they can effectively tell suppliers to not let others sell high capacity cards. Especially because VRAM suppliers might worry about ramping up production too much and then being left with an oversupply situation.

moffkalast 1y ago

> 1.7x the performance of the A1000 for AI inference That's a bold claim when their acceleration software (IPEX) is barely maintained and incompatible with most inference stacks, and their Vulkan driver is far behind it in performance.

swiftcoder 1y ago

IIRC, the RTX A1000 is an RTX 3050 8GB with ~10% of the shader cores disabled, retailing for double the price of a 3050? I guess it's a boon for Intel that NVidia repeatedly shoots their own workstation GPUs in the foot...

eYrKEC2 1y ago
They may not be disabling them maliciously -- they may be "binning" them -- running tests on the parts and then fusing off/disabling broken pieces of the silicon in order to avoid throwing away a chip that mostly works.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  Yep, that's likely the case - but they still charge double for the reduced-performance binned chip, just because it's a "professional" GPU (which, last I heard, really just means it can use the pro variant of the GPU drivers)
  - derefr 1y ago
    Funny enough, maybe the fusing itself (if they go a bit above-and-beyond on it) is exactly why it is a pro model. I.e. maybe Nvidia say "if we're going to fuse some random number of cores such that this is no longer a 3050, then let's not only fuse the damaged cores, but also do a long burn-in pass to observe TDP, and then fuse the top 10% of cores by measured TDP." If they did that, it would mean that the resulting processor would be much more stable under a high duty cycle load, and so likely to last much longer in an inference-cluster deploy environment. And the extra effort (= bottlenecking their supply of this model at the QC step) would at least partially justify the added cost. Since there'd really be no other way to produce a card with as many FLOPS/watt-dollar, without doing this expensive "make the chip so tiny it's beyond the state-of-the-art to make it stably, then analyze it long enough to precision-disable everything required to fully stabilize it for long-term operation" approach.

zamadatix 1y ago

Comparing price to performance in this space might not make much sense as it would seem. One of the (very few) interesting qualities in the A1000 is that it's single slot, low profile, workstation GPU. Intel kept the "powered by the PCIe slot" aspect, but made it dual slot and full height. Needing a "workstation" GPU in a tiny form factor (i.e. not meant to slot and power full sized GPUs) was something one could squeeze on price for, but the only selling point of this is the price.

tizio13 1y ago
I think you might be mistaken on the height of the card, if you look at the ports they are mini-DP on a low profile bracket. The picture also states that it includes both types of brackets.
- zamadatix 1y ago
  Great catch, Serve The Home has a stacked picture of the two cards and they are indeed both low profile https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/NVIDIA-RTX-A1000-8GB-atop-Intel-Arc-Pro-B50-2.jpg https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/NVID.... If your SFF box/1u server has a 2-thick NIC slot it may well be great for that use case then!
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
Theoretically, they should be able to launch something more competitive in that form-factor next year, though, right?
- zamadatix 1y ago
  With this wattage I'm not sure why they went double slot in this generation. Maybe they thought having a few dB more silence was a more unique placement for the card or something. The thickness of a GPU largely comes from the cooler, everything else typically fits under the height of the display connectors, and this GPU could certainly work with a single slot cooler.
1y ago