Intel Arc B70 benchmarks reveal massive software tax

The Arc Pro B70 is a "tinkerer's card" that offers massive hardware potential hampered by a software stack still in its infancy. Despite having 100GB/s more memory bandwidth than the RTX 4070 Super, the B70 outputs tokens twice as slowly (32.6 vs 67.1 tokens/sec), highlighting the high "software tax" of the SYCL backend. The lack of Flash Attention on Intel results in quadratic VRAM scaling, where a 64k context window required 27.5GB on Intel and led to driver crashes at higher context lengths. Nvidia maintains a clear lead in power efficiency, generating double the performance while pulling 40 fewer watts during active inference. The primary value proposition remains the 32GB VRAM buffer, which allows for running models like Qwen 3.5 27B that simply won't fit on consumer-grade Nvidia cards without expensive offloading. Future performance gains are contingent on software updates as the SYCL and OpenVINO drivers are not yet fully utilizing the Xe2 architecture's capabilities.