Intel Arc Pro B70 packs 32GB VRAM on a new Xe2 die at $950, benchmarked across AI inference, media editing, rendering, and CAD against AMD R9700 and NVIDIA Blackwell.
Key Takeaways
New Xe2 die doubles B50 Xe-cores and VRAM to 32GB; 256-bit bus, 608 GB/s bandwidth, 230W TDP, $950 street price.
Undercuts AMD R9700 by ~30% but R9700 has 2x FP32 and 5x matrix performance on paper; B70 doubles VRAM over NVIDIA 2000 Blackwell at a $200 premium.
After Effects: 47% slower than 2000 Blackwell. Blender: beats R9700 by 9%. DaVinci Resolve: 27% faster than 2000 Blackwell, 8% behind R9700.
No NVIDIA card matches 32GB under $950; the nearest option is the 4500 Blackwell at 2.5x the price, making MLPerf AI inference the B70’s clearest value case.
Unreal Engine trails R9700 by 47% despite beating 2000 Blackwell by 20%, a meaningful gap for arch-viz and game development pipelines.
Hacker News Comment Review
The only substantive comment flags 230W TDP as a deployment constraint: hobbyist appeal is real, but power draw makes multi-unit or rack inference setups expensive and thermally complex.
