Intel Battlematrix review finds limited software support for four Arc Pro B70 cards
If you were wondering why Arc Pro B70 reviews have been so limited, we actually have no clue. However, HardwareLuxx review may give us an explanation. Intel’s BMG-G31 launch was unusually quiet and focused almost entirely on workstation and AI workloads, with no visible push around gaming coverage.
Review coverage has also been pretty much nonexistent, which suggests Intel has selected only a small number of outlets for exposure. I’m quite surprised that Intel chose one publication to receive a full four-card setup while many others appear to have had no access at all. Regardless, here’s what they found.
Hardwareluxx published the first review focused on a workstation with four Intel Arc Pro B70 cards. The test used Intel’s Battlematrix setup of four cards with a Xeon w5-3435X, an ASUS Pro WS W790E-SAGE SE motherboard, 128 GB of DDR5 memory, and Arc Pro driver 32.0.101.8515 under both Windows 11 and Ubuntu. Each Arc Pro B70 carries 32 Xe2 cores, 32 GB of GDDR6 memory, a 256-bit bus, and 608 GB/s of bandwidth, while Intel lists the card at $949 before tax.
Source: Hardware Luxx
In single-card workstation tests, the Arc Pro B70 landed close to AMD’s Radeon Pro W7800 and sometimes ahead of it. In Blender, Hardwareluxx recorded 1357.2 samples/min in Monster, 930.0 in Junkshop, and 928.0 in Classroom, where it edged past the W7900 in that last scene. The review says the Arc Pro B70 is often around twice as fast as the Arc Pro B50, helped by the larger BMG-G31 GPU and much higher memory bandwidth.
In Geekbench AI with OpenVINO, the Arc Pro B70 led the field in half precision and quantized tests. In MLPerf Client, it delivered 93.5 tokens/s in Llama 3.1 8B, just behind the Radeon Pro W7900 at 101.8 tokens/s, while its 0.12 s time-to-first-token was much lower than the AMD and NVIDIA cards listed in the review. Procyon also showed good results, with the Arc Pro B70 finishing AI image generation in 1.932 seconds per image in INT8 and 3.029 seconds in FP16.
Source: Hardware Luxx
Project Battlematrix issues
Windows detected all four cards without issue, but none of the workstation and AI benchmark suites it used could properly scale across multiple GPUs. Even Blender did not make use of more than one card.
The only workload where the site could test two and four GPUs in a useful way was LMStudio under Ubuntu, and scaling was not linear because the cards communicate over PCIe with no direct interconnect. Hardwareluxx also notes that 64 GB across two cards was still not enough for some 120B-class models, while four cards and 128 GB finally made those workloads usable at practical throughput.
Source: Hardware Luxx
Power draw also climbs fast in this configuration. German media measured 26 W idle for a single Arc Pro B70, around 180.7 W under inference load for one card, 367.7 W for two cards, and 720.6 W for four. Do note that the official max board power specs for the Arc Pro B70 reference design are 230W, so 720W is lower than that figure scaled (920W).
Arc Pro B70 looks competitive as a relatively low-cost rendering and local inference card, but the software stack and limited multi-GPU application support still hold back Intel’s Battlematrix idea.
Source: HardwareLuxx
