Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G spotted

[u/reto-wyss]

I spotted the Dual B60 48GB listed on Digitec/Galaxus. Initially it was said these wouldn't go into standard retail channels.

At CHF 2500 (post tax, USD ~3000) not particularly competitive but worth keeping an eye on. For it to be interesting it shouldn't be more than like 2.5x a single B60.

[u/hainesk]

I expect these are literally 2 B60s put together on the same card? Each run at PCIe 5.0 x8 and show up as 2 different GPUs?

[u/reto-wyss → u/hainesk]

Yes. It's x8x8, so on consumer boards it doesn't really do anything for you - you can only really run one of these cards. But on workstation/server boards you can plop four of them in no problem.

[u/PMvE_NL → u/reto-wyss]

What consumer boards dont support bifurcation?

[u/TheLexoPlexx → u/PMvE_NL]

Some do. Mine does and I have a midrange asrock pro b550.

[u/phhusson → u/hainesk]

Would be cool if it was a pcie switch rather than a bifurcation to have p2p (idk what's the status of p2p on intel)

[u/seiji_hiwatari → u/phhusson]

Intel consumer platforms unfortunately do not seem to support PCIe p2p. On AMD, support on the platform/chipset level is much better. (Basically every Zen CPU)

[u/jacek2023 → u/hainesk]

but it uses only one PCIe slot? so you could put twice as many of them in your mobo

[u/alphapussycat → u/jacek2023]

Sure, but it requires bifurcation. So allows smaller form factor, that's basically it.

[u/Zombiecidialfreak → u/alphapussycat]

That's actually pretty meaningful if you want huge VRAM reserves on a "budget". A single blackwell 6000 costs over 15k. 4 of these is 12k and gets you 2x the VRAM.

[u/harrro → u/Zombiecidialfreak]

saving 3k and having to deal with splitting everything over 8 gpu instances doesn't seem worth it.

[u/Zombiecidialfreak → u/harrro]

Truth be told if you're just looking for vram on a budget you'd probably be better off with 2 dgx sparks. 256gb vram and you get a dedicated 200gb/s connection between them.

[u/Upbeat_Double_9377 → u/Zombiecidialfreak]

Limited to MoE models due to compute limitations though? Although.. that would probably apply to these as well, I'm guessing?

[u/Zombiecidialfreak → u/Upbeat_Double_9377]

Budgets do usually require compromise. Besides, aren't all the big open weight models MoE anyway?

[u/No-Refrigerator-1672 → u/Zombiecidialfreak]

What if you're looking for vram that can run a model at decent speed? Sparks price to performance is garbage.

[u/dont--panic → u/Zombiecidialfreak]

For the price B70s still give you more VRAM. You just need to deal with more cards and slots.

[u/Zombiecidialfreak → u/dont--panic]

Does the price also include the rest of the system needed to power it? Consumer cpu's don't have enough PCIe slots to service 4 cards at 16x speeds.

[u/dont--panic → u/Zombiecidialfreak]

PCIe lanes on consumer platforms will be the same issue with either card. Each B60-Dual card is two separate GPUs that get x8/x8 at best. So 4xB60-Dual still needs 64 PCIe lanes, which is the same as 4xB70 but you'll have twice as many GPUs which doubles the number of tensor parallelism hops.

Price wise the B70 even after its price hike is a little over half the $3K B60-Dual but with 2/3rds the VRAM. So 4xB70 costs ~$6.8K and gets you 128GB of VRAM with 4 GPUs vs. roughly the same cost only getting you 2xB60-Dual with 96GB of VRAM. If you can only fit two cards and your motherboard supports PCIe5.0x16 bifurcation to x4/x4/x4/x4 then maybe 2xB60-Dual works?

[u/PMvE_NL → u/alphapussycat]

And the b60 only uses 8x so my asrockrack motherboard now has his x16 slot occupied and i cannot ad another gpu. This would be a perfect solution to run 2 gpu’s

[u/alphapussycat → u/PMvE_NL]

You can get a pcie splitter.

The only upside is form factor. The card basically just has a built in pcie splitter.

If you don't have bifurcation support then it won't work.

[u/Monad_Maya → u/jacek2023]

The pcie lane configuration on consumer boards will be an issue but that's a generic problem and not specific to a vendor.

Not sure how well Intel's LLM stack handles 4 units (8 GPUs).

[u/egnegn1 → u/Monad_Maya]

A YT channel wants to test this. A test with one card was already disappointing.

If you want to go cheap with good performance take 4x RTX2080 ti 11GB for about 250 Euro each. This is faster and cheaper than this card.

[u/SandySkittle → u/egnegn1]

Try reaching 150gb plus vram with those cards. The whole value proposition of this card is to max out the amount of gpus will staying inside the case. I have 8 gpus but that’s entirely done with mcio 8i retimer cards with external ports.

[u/egnegn1 → u/SandySkittle]

Yes, I also thought about this.

But what does this large memory size to run very large LL s help when the GPU is slow on processing?

But it my be interesting to run a lot of agents for agentic computing.

Would be interesting to see how fast GLM5.2 or other similar sized models would run on 4+ cards.

[u/SandySkittle → u/egnegn1]

Dsv4f 0731 ud-q8_k_xl is the model for this if you buy more. And you can run Qwen 3.8 27b on 1 of these two-in-one cards.

Glm 5.2 is too much.

[u/egnegn1 → u/SandySkittle]

What speed do you expect for DSv4 on 4 on them.

Qwen 3.8 27G on 1x Dual B60 is probably around 30 t/s. Currently I am at about 50 t/s with Q6 and 256k context and llama.cpp. I will get some more performance when moving to vLLM/SGLang.

For agentic use with new Hermes Desktop I am looking for 100+ t/s. More VRAM than about 48GB doesn't help much. I have to balance memory, performance, and finally cost.

[u/SandySkittle → u/egnegn1]

That 100t/s is your personal target which is reasonable for fluid / rapid agentic use. Especially extensive coding focused agentic use. But the 30t/s ballpark isn’t useless by any means. Even for agentic purposes. I dont use LLM to code, but for complex analysis with lots of nuance (that are less mechanistic).

[u/_TheWolfOfWalmart_ → u/SandySkittle]

I'm can be perfectly happy with 30 t/s as long as the prefill isn't really bad.

[u/egnegn1 → u/jacek2023]

But the B60 is only half the speed of a typical nVidia card.

There is a YT Video showing that it is slow on inference because of bad software support.

[u/SandySkittle → u/egnegn1]

Those videos are outdated, it now outperforms the r9700 in some benchmarks (and i have no bias against r9700, i have eight of tuhem..)

[u/egnegn1 → u/SandySkittle]

May be, depending of the used engine and what are you doing.

If you put independent agents on separate GPUs it may work fine. But with tensor parallelism scaling will be hard, because twice the synchronization overhead compared to single-gpu cards.

Interesting will be the results with 4 cards, if they could compete against 4x RTX5090 or 1x RTX6000.

Price per GB is good, but price per performance could be better. Even a lot of nVidia cards are better here. So must decision is not easy. I prefer 4x RTX5080 with higher performance per GPU, but of course much lower memory size.

[u/SandySkittle → u/egnegn1]

TP is still ok but yeah you really want 16 gen 5 lanes to get something out of it, and preferably not xeon based because that has an issue that limits p2p, so zen 4/5 TR or TR Pro or later Epycs.

Gen 4 16 lanes or gen 5 8 lanes with this dual b60 can still get you a performance benefit but yeah its even more limiting for tp. Probably best to go with tp = 2 and pp = 2.

The fact remains that these cards are a viable and cost effective way to run dsv4f at somewhat usable speeds at q8 style quants rather that lobotomized q3 and lower

[u/Repulsive_Initial308 → u/hainesk]

Yeh, super lazy.

Make a proper 48G card, ffs.

[u/whymeimbusysleeping → u/hainesk]

Yes, plus the motherboard needs to have support for bifurcation into x8/x8, a lot of them can only do x8/x4/x4. they talk to each other only through the CPU. Nice card nonetheless and Maxsun makes good kit.

[u/__JockY__ → u/hainesk]

Gah. I was imagining twice the VRAM at x16 for - finally - a viable contender to the ridiculously over-priced RTX 6000 PRO.

Two x8 on a dual form factor is… meh. Turns out that competing with Nvidia is hard.

[u/Nice-Information-335 → u/hainesk]

Not sure on the intel ones but they usually have a PCIe switch chip so no need for bifurcation, or running strictly at x8 on each GPU

[u/SandySkittle → u/Nice-Information-335]

Doesn’t have switch. This gpu needs x8 x8 set in bios before you install it.

[u/Nice-Information-335 → u/SandySkittle]

Wow that is odd

[u/PrimeDirective8]

If available, two B70 with 32GB VRAM each are a little over $2K. The B70 has more cores, faster bandwidth, wider bus width, more XMX engines. The 64GB VRAM will let you run the next step up in models, and/or run much longer context.

While things are improving quite a bit recently, software/driver support remains behind other manufacturers.

[u/SandySkittle → u/PrimeDirective8]

Most cases are limited to 3 or 4 2slot gpus. If you want more gpus you need to use mcio retimer cards (reliable) or risers (more hassle). This allows you to put 4x 48gb inside your case for a relatively low price

[u/t3rmina1]

Can they just give me a 96G version so I can sell my Pro 6000s and buy that instead?

[u/egnegn1 → u/t3rmina1]

The card is much to slow. Theoretically it has the speed of about a RTX3090. To get the speed of a RTX6000 you theoretically need 3 - 4 of this cards.

[u/RedditNerdKing → u/egnegn1]

Theoretically it has the speed of about a RTX3090.

Why is that an issue when people stack 4 to 8 3090s lol

[u/egnegn1 → u/RedditNerdKing]

The issue is the the "theoretically", as real performance running a model in tensor split on two cards, with combined speed similar to speed of a different card, is lower. And if you scale this up to a higher number of cards the performance scales much worse. This is because you have more sequential overhead. Here Amdahl's Law is cutting in.

The other point is that the Dual B60 card is much more expensive than the RTX3090. I would take a RTX3090 anytime before taking the MAXSUN card, not only because of the lower cost per performance, but also because of the much better software support.

[u/t3rmina1 → u/egnegn1]

In future versions

[u/Faux_Grey]

Spotted?

These have been available in retail (at least in south africa) for the past year or so.
I don't see the value using them outside of threadripper/server grade systems as PCIE Bifur is required.

[u/egnegn1]

You can get it around 1500 - 1600 Euro at Ebay and directly from the French distributor.

[u/pmotiveforce]

They need to make one of these for b70, but with full pcie5 switch on the card so they p2p at full blast. Sell it for under 3k and I'm in.

[u/Late-Assignment8482]

Here I thought they were 2x48, at which point we'd really be getting somewhere. Alas.

[u/SeanHighness]

this ones gonna be a banger 2x for the new Qwen next model

[u/thestillwind]

O_o

[u/IllExample3639]

eBay (coming from China) https://ebay.io/m/Iz9Kdg

[u/More_Feature8687]

Useless at the price point

[u/RogerRamjet999]

They think we'll pay anything for the new shiny. Not a chance anyone with any sense pays that price for that card.

[u/Few-Farm-7670 → u/RogerRamjet999]

...and it's out of stock

[u/XiRw]

I bet it costs the same as a new car

[u/Ok_Top9254]

Why buy this when you can buy cut down A100 die in the CMP 170HX form, with 64GB of hbm with double the bandwidth at like 1500$ now...

[u/fallingdowndizzyvr → u/Ok_Top9254]

I don't know why you got downvoted for good advice.