Intel workstation and AI graphics cards: Arc B50 and B60 with up to 24 GByte
Intel's new workstation graphics cards with Battlemage architecture and up to 24 GB of graphics memory should be available from the third quarter of 2025.
Render image of Intel's Battlemage graphics chip.
(Image: Intel)
Intel's Arc Pro B50 and B60 are designed to give wings to smaller CAD and larger AI inference workstations. The Battlemage architecture, which is already used in Intel's Arc B580 and B570 gaming graphics cards, is used for this purpose. Unlike the gaming chips, Intel validates the Pro cards for PCI Express 5.0 and provides both with a generous memory buffer of 16 and 24 GB respectively.
The Arc Pro B50 is to be launched by Intel directly as a thick, small plug-in card with twice the width but half the height and, thanks to the low Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 70 watts, does not require an external power connection. Intel is aiming for a recommended retail price of 299 US dollars, to which taxes will be added as usual. This is around 40 dollars more than the Arc Pro A50 (starting from 253,74 €) and 110 dollars less than Nvidia charges for the older RTX A1000 with 8 GB (starting from 401,66 €) – however, the A1000 is already available on the market for around 395 euros.
(Image:Â Intel)
The Arc Pro B60, on the other hand, is sold exclusively by partners, of which Asrock and Sparkle are probably best known on the European continent. In addition, Gunnir, Maxsun, Onix, Senao and Lanner have already been provided with samples. The exact pricing of the Pro B60 will also be left to the partners.
The cards will be available from the third quarter of 2025, but will not receive all planned software features such as virtualization or remote management features until the fourth quarter. At the start, there will be optimized drivers that are currently being certified for design and engineering software by the providers, as well as the promise of quarterly updates and validated Linux support. According to Intel, the optimizations should be good for a performance increase of 10 (Solidworks) to 160 percent (PTC Creo) in the sub-programs of the SPEC ViewPerf15 benchmark suite – Something similar is also known from Nvidia drivers.
(Image:Â Intel)
More performance thanks to more memory
The performance gains promised by Intel compared to the competition and predecessor models can largely be attributed to the generous memory configuration. As long as AI models such as DeepSeek R1 14B with INT4 quantization still fit into the local graphics memory, the Arc Pro B60 works 60 percent faster than an RTX A2000 Ada with 16 GB, but is 15 percent slower than a GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB, according to Intel. If the 16 GB overrun and the 24 GB of the B60 are sufficient, it outperforms the aforementioned competitors. Intel claims to have measured up to a factor of 2.7 compared to the A2000 Ada.
In AI applications, the Arc Pro B50 with its 16 GByte is ahead of the predecessor Arc Pro A50 with 6 GByte by a factor of 3.5 in some inference tests.
PCI Express 5.0 is said to deliver up to 20 percent more performance than a comparable PCIe 4.0 interface, especially for video applications. However, Intel fails to mention that the Arc Pro B50 and B60 only use eight PCIe lanes, meaning that a fully equipped PCIe 4 card with 16 lanes achieves the same transfer rate.
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Intel also intends to sell the Arc Pro B60 in particular as part of workstations for AI inferencing. Up to eight Arc Pro B60s with a total of 192 GB of graphics memory (distributed across four plug-in cards) will then give AI applications a boost. With appropriate optimizations and adjustments, larger models can also be distributed across the graphics memory of different cards. This can also increase the number of simultaneous requests, for example, which would otherwise take up additional memory.
Intel wants to deliver optimized container-based software for LLMs that contain everything from Linux drivers to adapted LLMs with corresponding quantization to get started right away.
(Image:Â Intel)
Intel has not revealed in advance when the workstations will be available in stores, but expects prices to range from 5000 to 10,000 US dollars.
| Key technical data: Intel Arc Pro series | |||||
| Graphics card | Arc Pro B60 | Arc Pro B50 | Arc Pro A60 | Arc Pro A50 | Arc Pro A40 |
| Manufacture | TSMC N5 | TSMC N6 | |||
| Xe cores / RT cores (shader units) | 20 / 20 (2560) | 16 / 16 (2048) | 16 Xe-Cores (2048) | 8 Xe-Cores (128 EUs) | 8 Xe-Cores (128 EUs) |
| RT-Cores | 20 | 16 | 16 | 8 | 8 |
| XMX-Engines (AI) | 160 | 128 | 256 | 128 | 128 |
| Basic/turbo cycle | k.A. / ~2,40 GHz | k.A. / ~2,60 GHz | k.A. / ~2,45 GHz | 2,05 / k.A. GHz | 1,55 / k.A. GHz |
| Computing power (FP32 / INT8 dense) | 12,28 TFlops / 197 TOps | 10,65 TFlops / 170 TOps | 10,04 TFlops / 157 TOps | 4,8 TFlops / 76 TOps | 3,5 TFlops / 56 TOps |
| Graphics memory | 24 GByte | 16 GByte | 12 GByte | 6 GByte | 6 GByte |
| Transfer rate graphics memory | 492 GByte/s | 224 GByte/s | 384 GByte/s | 192 GByte/s | 192 GByte/s |
| Display output | Je nach Partner | 4x mDP 2.0-ready (UHBR13.5) | 4x DP 2.0-ready (UHBR10) | 4x mDP 2.0-ready (UHBR10) | 4x mDP 2.0-ready (UHBR10) |
| Display resolution | 4x 4K60, 2x 8K60, 2x 5K120, 1x 5KW240 | ||||
| System interface | PCIe 5.0 x8 | PCIe 5.0 x8 | PCIe 4.0 x16 | PCIe 4.0 x8 | PCIe 4.0 x8 |
| Thermal Design Power | 120-200 Watt | 70 Watt | 130 Watt | 75 Watt | 50 Watt |
| Cooling | Je nach Partner | Dual-Slot, Half-Height | Single Slot, Full Height | Dual-Slot, Half-Height | Single-Slot, Half-Height |
| Warranty | 3 years | ||||
(csp)
