Today Intel announced their new Arc Pro B70 and B65 graphics processing units aiming to bring some competition to both the gaming PC world as well as the generative AI computing world. An impressive new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 also with Arc Pro GPU built in was announced as well. I got to see a few things these new GPUs are capable of, so let’s check it out.
The 3D graphics software and AI diffusion model image generation capabilities were the things I was most interested in. In the above photo, the middle computer is running Blender and includes an open source noise reduction component made by Intel for preview renders which was very impressive.
On the right computer, Intel had a Comfy-UI installation with a custom front-end that was running the Z-Image Turbo diffusion model for generating images on the fly. It was quite fast, but Z-Image Turbo is already pretty fast, so it was hard to tell exactly how it might compare with more expensive NVIDIA GPUs. The staff said that Comfy-UI and Z-Image Turbo worked right out of the box, but I couldn’t tell if they were using the NVIDIA accelerated version of Comfy-UI or what. Still, it was looking pretty good.
The new GPUs will have up to 32 X cores, 32Gb of VRAM, 4x DisplayPort 2.1, Gen 5 PCIe, 32 ray tracing units, and 367 total TOPS. They’ll show up to 69% higher performance compared to the older Intel Arc Pro B60 GPUs as well.
The new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 mobile processors also have Intel Arc Pro B390 graphics processors built in. That gives you up to 86% faster graphics than the previous generation, up to 12 ray tracing units, and up to 12 X-cores, with up to 4 dsiplays at 6K 60fps. We’re also looking at an up to 95% performance increase over something like the AMD HX Pro 375.
Some other Core Ultra series 3 specs to brag about are in the battery life. You can get up to 27 hours of video streaming or up to 9 hours of Microsoft Teams 3×3 with Windows Studio Effects. That 9 hours of video conferencing sounds pretty amazing from a specifications and battery life perspective, but as a human I certainly wouldn’t want to be stuck in a video call for 9 hours straight.
Still, those kind of battery life numbers on an x86 architecture sure sound like we might not really need ARM processors so much after all.