The GPU in my hand, the Intel Arc Pro B60, is quite possibly the most
important GPU, not just of this year, but maybe the next few years, because of
the way that it could massively disrupt NVIDIA's near monopoly on professional
GPUs, drive costs way down for proumers
and professionals alike, and if the demos they have running in the suite are
anything to go by, change the game for AI developers and for businesses who are
looking to leverage AI private. privately without giving their data away
to companies like OpenAI and Deepseek. And I managed to get some good news for
gamers, too. It wasn't an easy conversation, but I've got a solid
commitment from Intel's VP and general manager for discrete graphics, Vivian.
Yes, the OG land party queen of DFI, to get back to me on what their plan is to
ensure that ARC consumer cards are going to be available at MSRP in the US, where
they're often still well over. Stay tuned for that. Coming back to Ark Pro
though, man. I get it. These are supposed to be for boring people in
suits or whatever, but I'm almost feeling some of that land party energy
here. Like, check out this wild board from Maxon. It's dual GPU with each of
them getting eight lanes of PCIe Gen 5 and a total of 48 gigs of GDDR6 memory
that yes, my friends, through some software magic that's part of what Intel
is calling battle matrix can be shared across multiple GPUs for AI workloads,
enabling models of up to 192 GB to sit
in GPU memory. And that's just the tip
of the iceberg. Oh, what's that down there? Oh, that's the tip of this segue
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Let's get the basics out of the way first. If you know the B580 Battle Mage
gaming GPU, then you're already pretty familiar with the new Arc Pro B60. But
there are some key differences. First up, the clock speeds are actually lower,
which Intel says is to ensure the utmost instability and reliability for
professional users. But don't let that fool you into thinking it's some kind of
slouch for performance. Memory has been doubled from 12 gigs to 24 gigs. And as
we've covered in the past, certified drivers and OpenGL tuning can result in
much greater performance in professional applications with Intel showing off a
heavyweight list of software partners, including the likes of Solid Works,
Autodesk, and Blender. Here's a little fun fact, by the way. They won't prevent
you from installing gaming drivers on your Arc Pro card if you're the kind of
person who likes to mix business and pleasure on your PC. Let's take a closer
look at some of these cards. I absolutely love that Intel is not taking
the same approach as others in the space, locking their board partners into
sometimes imperfect reference card designs. We've got a variety of
everything from power connectors. This one has dual eight pins. This one has
single eight pins. This guy over here with the dual GPUs gets the much
maligned 12vt 2x6 connector. The point is not whether one of these approaches
is superior to the other. The point is that you as the customer have an option.
You want three fans. There's this two fans, one fan. How about no fans, a
passive design, and use the chassis's air flow in order to blow air through
the cooler. NVIDIA in particular has this weird allergy to cards being used
for no not quite what we prescribe it for applications and it's refreshing to
see somebody take a different approach. Regardless of the cooler design or
power, you're going to get the same HDMI 2.1 as well as DisplayPort 2.0 UHBR
13.5 and PCIe Gen 5. That is an upgrade
over the consumer ARC cards which are PCIe Gen 4. I know it's practically
cliche at this point, but it's been so long since I've seen a dual GPU card. I
kind of can't help but tear it down with my handy convenient LT store precision
screwdriver. Thanks, James. That right there is the
biggest change from the consumer cards. Instead of just having memory on the
front side of the PCB, each of our GPUs has memory on the back side of the PCB
as well. That's what gives you double the capacity. Now before you ask,
no SLI, Crossfire, XCSS, Fire, whatever
is not coming. This is purely to enable customers to install more GPUs in fewer
PCIe slots, but I still think it's super cool. Should we look at the other
side? Let's go, boys. Oh, that's so
cool, dude. Shout out, Maxon.
Okay, there's lots of cool stuff to kind of talk about here. Starting with the
fact that this just uses a standard four pin power connector. Thank you. Why
can't GPU coolers just use these? Then it would be so much flipping easier for
me to just like, I don't know, run a
regular fan. Okay, it doesn't really change that much. But this is also cool.
Check this out. This is very early hardware. You can actually see they did
a hand rework on this with this little hair finness copper wire here.
Man, that's a lot of GPUs on one board. Okay, it's two, but that's a lot more
than usual. Last thing, this is pretty cool. So, you can actually see the PCIe
lanes routed off to the separate GPUs. So, each of them gets a B8 interface.
And then check this out. Each of them gets a single HDMI and a single display
port. So, this card is effectively just like installing two by8 GPUs in your
system. You just have to have a slot that supports bifurcation. So cool. Moving on to the
Ark Pro B50, this one's a bit more of an unknown. Like its bigger brother, it
gets a PCIe Gen 5 by8 interface and a
generous allocation of VRAM that makes it very competitive against memory
starved cards like the NVIDIA RTX 10000 that Intel is positioning it against.
But unlike the B60, it's not just a repurposed consumer GPU. It gets just 16
XE cores compared to 18 in their B570
card, which is a bit of a downer, but it
enables it to hit just 70 watts of total board power, which lets it operate
without a separate power connector for some pretty cool use cases. Imagine, if
you will, that you have a giant chassis on wheels like this. Now, imagine you
have the opposite of that. you have a little slimline office workstation like
you'd see deployed in an architectural office. This will fit perfectly in that
without upgrading the power supply. Or hear me out, if you had a shop
environment where you don't want active cooling drawing sawdust and crud into
your machine and then kicking it around, I'd love to see someone do a passively
cooled one of these. The coolest stuff is what's coming down the road, though.
Let's turn our attention to Battle Matrix, which Intel is still working on
the software magic for, but has it
working enough that they're able to show off some pretty compelling demos. Behind
me is full fat Deepseek. Okay, quantized
4bit, but still DeepSeek with 671
billion parameters running locally on
one system. Now, not everything fits into VRAMm. They've got about 256 agents
that don't get used as much on the system RAM, but this is it. Full fat
Deepseek running on local hardware. This is perfect for a firm that has valuable
intellectual property and doesn't want to entrust any of it to an offsite
cloud-based AI. Boom, one box. And the
secret sauce that I can't emphasize enough is that the VRAMm sharing that's
going on with those GPUs is done in software rather than needing a fancy
NVLink interface. Say for example,
they've got another demo here. This is a code debugging demo that's showing
corrupted video output on a Lunar Lake engineering sample right here. The model
and the context take about 96 gigs. And
uh while this demo is actually playback rather than real time because it took so
long, what it's showing here is multiple AI agents working together to ultimately
take the corrupted video encoding output and turn it into something that works.
The mic drop moment though is the price. Unlike the consumer cards, Intel is
leaving pricing to their board partners on these. So, I can't give you an exact
price for the B60, but they are giving us enough information about these
shockingly competent AI cards to infer a
price. Battle Matrix is expected to land in the 5,000
to$10,000 range, depending on whether you have a single B60 or up to eight.
So, by my math, that's about 700 bucks a
pop, which means that Mac Studio that I bought turned out to be, pardon my
French, a complete waste of money. But
hey, that's progress, baby. So, that's
what's happening today. But what about the future? Intel is clearly committed
to ARC integrated graphics. And looking
at the road map for professional, not to mention the importance of AI in the
future, they're clearly committed to that. But what about us gamers? What's
the commit level there? Well, no matter how hard I pressed, they weren't willing
to talk themselves into the same traps they ran into in the leadup to Arc
Alchemist. They don't want to overcommit. But what they would say is
that they're working really hard on building a hardware development pipeline
that enables them to much more easily leverage their hardware across
integrated gaming and professional which I'm taking as a yes. So, I hope it's
clear to everyone, the Intel folks in this room who worked so hard to bring
these products to life and put these demos together, and to you at home, how
hard it is that I am rooting for them to succeed here. Just like I'm
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If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the conclusion of the Ark
Battle Mage Challenge? Spoiler, one of the participants went out and bought an
Ark based on their experience. That's a pretty strong
endorsement.