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Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

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Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#221

Post by danielEM »

snowram wrote: post #131
bsder wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Ryzen AI max+ 395 128GB can do 256GBps so lets put all these "ifs" to bed once for all. That is absolutely no brainer to drop more RAM as long as there is enough bits in address space of physical hardware. And there usually is, as same silicons are branded and packaged differently for commercial market and for consumer market. Check up how chinese are doubling 4090s RAM from 24 to 48GB.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#222

Post by eYrKEC2 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #182
tester756 wrote: post #17

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…

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...

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.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#223

Post by Moto7451 »

bsder wrote: post #123
tester756 wrote: post #17

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…

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.

This is not that sort of workstation.

My first software job was at a place doing municipal architecture. The modelers had and needed high end GPUs in addition to the render farm, but plenty of roles at the company simply needed anything with better than what the Intel integrated graphics of the time could produce in order to open the large detailed models.

In these roles the types of work would include things like seeing where every pipe, wire, and plenum for a specific utility or service was in order to plan work between a central plant and a specific room. Stuff like that doesn’t need high amounts of VRAM since streaming textures in worked fine. A little lag never hurt anyone here as the software would simply drop detail until it caught up. Everything was pre-rendered so it didn’t need large amounts of power to display things. What did matter was having the grunt to handle a lot of content and do it across three to six displays.

Today I’m guessing the integrated chips could handle it fine but even my 13900K’s GPU only does DisplayPort 1.4 and up to only three displays on my motherboard. It should do four but it’s up to the ODMs at that point.

For a while Matrox owned a great big slice of this space but eventually everyone fell to the wayside except NVidia and AMD.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#224

Post by zamadatix »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #209
zamadatix wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sque…

Theoretically, they should be able to launch something more competitive in that form-factor next year, though, right?

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.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#225

Post by zamadatix »

tizio13 wrote: post #208
zamadatix wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sque…

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.

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/NVID.... If your SFF box/1u server has a 2-thick NIC slot it may well be great for that use case then!

Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#226

Post by imiric »

Fnoord wrote: post #159
imiric wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not sure there is significant enough market for those. How so? The prosumer local AI market is quite large and growing every day, and is much more lucrative per capita than the gamer market. Gamers are an afterthought for GPU manufacturers. NVIDIA has been neglecting the segment for years, and is now much more focused on enterprise and AI workloads. Gamers get marginal performance bumps each generation, and si…

I think the timeline is roughly: SGI (90s), Nvidia gaming (with ATi and then AMD) eating that cake. Then cryptocurrency took off at the end '00s / start '10s, but if we are honest things like hashcat were also already happening. After that AI (LLMs) took off during the pandemic. During the cryptocurrency hype, GPUs were already going for insane prices and together with low energy prices or surplus (which solar can ca…

You're right, high demand certainly plays a role. But it's one thing for the second-hand market to dictate the price of used hardware, and another for new hardware to steadily get more expensive while its objective capabilities only see marginal improvements. At a certain point it becomes blatant price gouging.

NVIDIA is also taking consumers for a ride by marketing performance based on frame generation, while trying to downplay and straight up silence anyone who points out that their flagship cards still struggle to deliver a steady 4K@60 without it. Their attempts to control the narrative of media outlets like Gamers Nexus should be illegal, and fined appropriately. Why we haven't seen class-action lawsuits for this in multiple jurisdictions is beyond me.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#227

Post by [deleted] »

fwipsy wrote: post #187
snowram wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe because only AI enthusiasts want that much VRAM, and most of them will pony up for a higher-end GPU anyways? Everyone is suggesting it here because that's what they want, but I don't know if this crowd is really representative of broader market sentiment.

[deleted]

Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#228

Post by hadlock »

vid wrote: post #219
rdos wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no point in using a low-bandwidth card like the B50 for AI. Attempting to use 2x or 4x cards to load a real model will result in poor performance and low generation speed. If you don’t need a larger model, use a 3060 or 2x 3060, and you’ll get significantly better performance than the B50—so much better that the higher power consumption won’t matter (70W vs. 170W for a single card). Higher VRAM wont make the…

Who said anything about the B50? Plenty of people use eg 2, 4 or 6 3090s to run large models at acceptable speeds. Higher VRAM at decent (much faster than DDR5) speeds will make cards better for AI.

If VRAM is ~$10/gb I suspect people paying $450 for a 12GB card would be happy to pay $1200 for a 64gb card. Running local LLM only uses about 3-6% of my GPU's capability, but all of it's VRAM. Local LLM has no need for 6 3090s to serve a single or handful of users; they just need the VRAM to run the model locally.

Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#229

Post by swiftcoder »

eYrKEC2 wrote: post #222
swiftcoder wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

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)

Re: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations

#230

Post by HDThoreaun »

srmatto wrote: post #213

GPUs 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+!

Datacenter 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
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