- Intel Arc Pro B50 doubles Xe cores over A50, delivering stronger performance
- Intel’s workstation GPU brings 16GB memory against Nvidia’s 8GB
- Low-profile 168mm card design highlights compact professional workstation ambitions
Intel’s latest workstation graphics card, the Arc Pro B50, has impressed for how well it stacks up against Nvidia’s RTX A1000.
Marketed as an entry-level professional GPU, the B50 is compact in size but ambitious in scope, carrying features that push it into serious workstation territory.
The Arc Pro B50 is built on Intel’s Xe2 architecture, the same foundation as the Battlemage consumer line, which also powers GPUs in gaming laptops.
A workstation card with modest ambitions
This chip doubles the Xe cores and ray tracing units of the previous Arc Pro A50 and comes equipped with new XMX matrix engines.
The Arc Pro B50 runs on the BMG-G21 GPU, a smaller chip that Intel deliberately capped for cost reasons.
The card offers 16 Xe2 cores and 128 XMX engines, supported by 16GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit interface, more than the 8GB on the A1000.
That extra capacity provides a larger buffer for professional workloads like CAD models, video editing, or running small AI models locally.
With 224GB/s bandwidth and 170 TOPS of FP8 compute, it targets efficiency rather than raw power.
In this regard, the B50 leads the A1000, which runs at a lower bandwidth of 192GB/s and delivers only 107.8 TOPS in INT8 workloads.
Unlike consumer designs, the B50 comes in a low-profile form factor measuring just 168mm, cooled by a single radial fan.
Its 70W TDP means it does not require auxiliary power, and there are four Mini DisplayPort 2.1 outputs, marking an upgrade over the A1000’s older 1.4a connectors.
These additions aim at workloads such as rendering, machine learning inference, and content creation.
Intel has also secured more than 50 certifications with major software vendors, a necessary step for competing in the workstation market.
In benchmarks, Intel’s B50 surprised many observers. Geekbench AI showed it well ahead of Nvidia’s A1000 across single precision and half precision tests.
Procyon AI benchmarks also highlighted faster results in computer vision and text generation.
The Arc Pro B50 also achieved a modest 7% advantage over the RTX A1000 in Photoshop, with even greater gains when isolating GPU-heavy tasks.
Premiere Pro showed similar results, with the B50 outperforming its rival by nearly 20% overall.
After Effects results were closer, although the B50 demonstrated clear strengths in 2D workloads.
Perhaps the most surprising outcome came from Blender, as rendering has traditionally been an area of Nvidia dominance, but the B50 posted a 20% lead over the A1000.
This generational jump, more than 130% over the older A50, shows that Intel has addressed past shortcomings.
The card also excelled in MLPerf benchmarks, generating tokens nearly twice as fast as Nvidia’s entry-level professional option.
However, in areas like Revit and Inventor, the B50 often trailed the RTX A1000, at times by wide margins.
In Inventor’s graphics test, the Nvidia card ran more than four times faster. Yet in SOLIDWORKS, the B50 reversed the result, posting a 33% advantage.
The Intel Arc Pro B50 is not the best GPU for every task, nor will it displace Nvidia in all markets, but for a card retailing at $350, it offers strong value for professional users.
Via Puget Systems / Hardwareluxx
