Intel announced the Arc Pro B-Series back at Computex consisting of the Arc Pro B50 and Arc Pro B60 graphics cards. Marking availability today and the review embargo lift is for the Arc Pro B50 for workstations, which provides 16GB of RAM, 70 Watt total board power, and a $349 USD launch price for this workstation graphics card. Here are the preliminary Linux performance benchmarks and open-source driver support metrics for the Intel Arc Pro B50.
With the Intel Arc Pro B50 being rated for just 70 Watts, its a compact small form factor (SFF) card that occupies just two expansion slots and is a low-profile card for the Intel-built model at least. This first to launch Arc Pro Battlemage graphics card features 16 Xe cores, 16GB of RAM, 170 peak TOPS, and 224 GB/s of memory bandwidth while utilizing PCIe Gen5 x8 connectivity.
Over the prior generation Intel Arc Pro A50, the Arc Pro B50 is a heck of a lot more capable. Beyond many of the hardware capabilities presenting a 2x or more generational leap, the software support now for the Battlemage timeframe is much better off than during the early Alchemist days. Especially as it pertains to the open-source Linux driver support being much better off now for Battlemage. Plus with Intel’s Project Battlematrix we are seeing SR-IOV support coming about, multi-device support will soon be here, and many other improvements as well as the Xe kernel driver being much more mature in general.
Intel’s briefing materials for the Arc Pro B50 reviews were primarily focusing on the performance advantages of the Arc Pro B50 over NVIDIA’s RTX A1000 competition. The NVIDIA RTX A1000 costs around $420 USD compared to the Arc Pro B50 with a $349 USD launch price.
Intel committed as well during the Arc Pro B50 briefing to their Project Battlematrix timelines of continued software improvements. By next quarter they expect full feature enablement for the Arc Pro B-Series hardware.
The Intel Arc Pro B50 graphics card includes both a low profile bracket and standard height PCIe bracket.
With being a 70 Watt TBP rating, no external PCIe power connector is required. There are four mini DisplayPort outputs on this graphics card.
Intel’s Linux driver guidance for the Arc Pro B50 at launch is to be using Ubuntu 25.04 with the Linux 6.14 kernel and Mesa 25.0.7 or newer. Linux 6.14+ and Mesa 25.0+ is easy to meet by most modern Linux distributions. Of course, the newer the kernel and Mesa drivers, the better the experience in terms of features and performance. As noted there is a lot in the current Linux 6.17 development tree around Project Battlematrix preparations and more for SR-IOV, multi-device prep, etc. The newer Mesa 25.1/25.2 and 25.3-devel releases also have additional performance optimizations and capabilities for Intel Battlemage GPUs at large for both the Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan drivers.
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