Intel’s Arc Pro B70/B65 lands squarely in the local LLM conversation

Why LocalLLaMA reacted so quickly

On r/LocalLLaMA, the thread titled Intel launches Arc Pro B70 and B65 with 32GB GDDR6 drew 213 upvotes and 133 comments at the time of review. The reason is straightforward: Intel’s new Arc Pro cards are aimed at workstation graphics and AI inference rather than gaming, and the Arc Pro B70 brings 32GB of VRAM at a suggested starting price of $949. For anyone running local models, that immediately puts the card into the conversation.

Intel’s March 25, 2026 newsroom post says the B70 and B65 are Xe2-based discrete GPUs designed for content creation, engineering workloads, and AI inference. Intel highlights up to 32 Xe Cores and 32GB VRAM, with optimization for multi-user and multi-agent workloads. The B70 is available starting March 25 through Intel and partner cards, while the B65 follows in mid-April through partners.

What matters in practice

Intel is marketing the B70 not just on raw specifications but on workload framing. The company says the B70 can offer up to 2.2x larger context windows versus competition, up to 6.2x faster responses in multi-agent or multi-user workloads, and up to 2x tokens per dollar. Those are vendor claims, but they line up closely with what the LocalLLaMA community actually cares about.

32GB of VRAM can expand the range of quantized models that fit comfortably on one card.

The price point is low enough to look meaningfully different from much more expensive professional accelerators.

Multi-user inference positioning makes the card relevant for small serving setups, not only single-user tinkering.

Why it matters

In the local LLM market, the practical constraint is often VRAM rather than headline FLOPS. Whether a model fits in memory, how much context it can hold, and how many concurrent sessions it can support often matters more than gaming-oriented performance metrics. That is where the B70 appears interesting: it targets the gap between consumer GPUs and far more expensive enterprise accelerators.

The open question is software maturity. Driver quality, inference-stack support, real llama.cpp or vLLM throughput, and power efficiency will determine whether the B70 becomes a real workhorse instead of a strong launch slide. That is why the Reddit discussion moved quickly from specs to deployability.

Original sources: Intel Newsroom, launch coverage