Intel Arc Pro B70 is shaping up as a straightforward answer to a common workstation headache, running out of VRAM at the worst time. A new leak points to a launch soon, with the card described as the first shipping product built on Intel’s larger Battlemage BMG-G31 chip. Arc Pro B70 is tipped to ship […]
The post Your next budget workstation GPU may be Intel Arc Pro B70 appeared first on Digital Trends.
Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and other chip companies usually have some kind of news to announce at CES to kick off the year, but some of those announcements are more interesting than others. Sometimes you see new chips with significant speed boosts and other new technologies, and sometimes you get rebranded versions of old silicon meant to fill out a lineup or make an existing architecture seem newer and more exciting than it is.
AMD's Ryzen CPU announcements this year fall firmly into the latter camp—these are all gently tweaked variants of chips that launched in 2024 and 2025.
Let's start with the Ryzen AI 400 series. Officially the follow-up to the Ryzen AI 300 chips announced in June 2024, these processors offer some modest clock speed improvements and faster memory support. The new Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 has a peak boost clock speed of 5.2 GHz and support for LPDDR5x-8533, for example, up from 5.1 GHz and LPDDR5x-8000 for the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, and its built-in neural processing unit (NPU) is capable of 60 trillion operations per second (TOPS) rather than 50 TOPS.
© AMD
AMD has published a new blog post attempting to convince people of its status as a GPU industry leader. Along the way, it seems to have inadvertently admitted its older GPUs are a better value than the newest models. It reminds us of the oft-used online phrase, “An attempt was made.”
The gist of the blog is boilerplate PR about how AMD Radeon GPUs are the best at every resolution and price point. It notably does not compare its GPUs against Intel or Nvidia with numbers. Anyway, with many AAA titles out currently and more on the way, AMD wants people looking to upgrade to buy an AMD GPU. To help convince them, it provides a handy chart showing the fps-to-dollar ratio for its entire 7000 and 6000 lineups across six games at 1080p: Apex Legends, Valorant, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, The Callisto Protocol, GTA V, and Overwatch 2.
All games were tested at “Max” settings, aside from the entry-level RX 6400, which ran these games at a “Medium” preset. It’s in this chart that it shows its 7900 GPUs offering the worst bang-for-the-buck value of its entire product stack.
If you just pay attention to the grey bars, you’ll note how they start out small at the top. They then proceed to get wider and wider, all the way to the bottom as it ticks through the 6000 series. This essentially shows that as you go down the product stack, fps-per-dollar only goes up. It means that every 6000 series GPU offers more fps-per-dollar than its most recent GPUs.
We’re not sure why AMD’s marketing team felt compelled to point this out. Perhaps it is just stating the obvious, that its newest GPUs have an early adopter tax built into their pricing. Maybe AMD is still happy to be selling RX 6000 series GPUs. We imagine Nvidia is in the same camp, as it needs to clear out its Ampere GPUs to pave the way for more Ada Lovelace purchases. Still, AMD seems to be faring well so far with its RDNA3 GPUs, vapor chamber issues aside.
As we reported previously, the RX 7900 XT is currently the top-selling GPU in Germany. You can insert a David Hasselhoff joke here, but the numbers show it’s been a success so far.
We reached out to AMD to help us understand why it’s pushing this angle, as it paints its older GPUs in a more favorable light than its newer models. We’ll update this article if and when we hear back.
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