Intel Arc Pro B70 Review (www.pugetsystems.com)

Intel has announced the release of its Intel Arc Pro B70, a professional GPU designed to compete in the AI and machine learning market. Distinct from competitors like AMD and NVIDIA, Intel created the B70 as a completely new product featuring double the Xe cores and VRAM of its predecessor, the B50, bringing the total to 32 GB. The card leverages Intel's second-generation Xe2 architecture, which enhances performance and efficiency, and includes advanced features like ECC memory for stability in professional applications. Significantly, the B70 is poised to be an attractive option for users needing high VRAM without breaking the bank, priced around 30% less than comparable AMD's R9700. In testing, the B70 exhibited substantial performance improvements over the B50, particularly in AI workloads, boasting 22.94 TFLOPS FP32 performance and a peak INT8 performance of 367 TOPS. While it trails behind its higher-priced competitors in some creative applications, such as Adobe Premiere and After Effects, it makes notable gains in demanding tasks like Blender rendering and MLPerf benchmarks, where it demonstrates solid potential as an AI-inference card. The introduction of the B70 expands Intel's footprint in the AI/ML GPU space, highlighting the ongoing competition and the need for hardware that balances price with performance in increasingly complex AI applications.