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It's been nearly one year to the week since Intel introduced [2]Project Battlematrix as their [3]initiative for improving their Linux driver support for the Arc Pro B-Series with enhancements such as bettering the multi-GPU support in allowing up to eight Arc Pro GPUs per system as well as other open-source driver optimizations in the era of AI. Recently with the [4]Arc Pro B70 in having four review samples for testing I was finally able to try out the multi-GPU state of the Arc (Pro) graphics cards on Linux with their open-source driver code.

[5]

I have run some preliminary tests of the Arc Pro B70 under Linux in up to a four GPU configuration. All of this testing was done on the recently-released Ubuntu 26.04 LTS using the fresh Linux 7.0 kernel for the latest stable Xe kernel graphics driver experience. Over the past year there has been a lot of improvements funneled into the mainline Xe kernel graphics driver for Arc GPUs at large and in areas like better multi-GPU support, memory management enhancements, etc. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is paired with the Mesa 26.0.3 graphics drivers for the Intel ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D driver optimizations that have seen much work over the past year for the Xe2 Battlemage graphics. For the Level Zero / SYCL and OpenCL support I was using the Intel Compute Runtime 26.14.37833.4 from three weeks ago with the IGC 2.32.7 compiler. Again, the Compute Runtime has also seen much investment over the past year with a focus on the Arc Pro B-Series and in more recent months beginning to prepare for the upcoming [6]Crescent Island AI accelerator.

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Loading up four Intel Arc Pro B70 graphics cards was a pretty seamless experience from the software side. For this round of testing the ASUS Pro WS TTRX50-SAGE WIFI motherboard was used with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9980X workstation. With the ASUS Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI, the first two graphics cards were running at full PCIe 5.0 x16 but then the third at PCIe 5.0 x16 at x8 mode, and the fourth graphics card bound by platform limitations to running at PCIe 4.0 x16.

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With the Ubuntu 26.04 + Linux 7.0 setup, all four Arc Pro B70 graphics cards were detected and functioning. The open-source Intel Compute Runtime stack effortlessly was easy to handle all four graphics cards. It was great being able to see how far the Intel discrete graphics support on Linux has come especially with having not been able to verify the multi-GPU support in the past.

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[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=intel-arc-pro-b70-four&image=arc_pro_b70_1_lrg

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Project+Battlematrix

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-pro-b-series

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Arc+Pro+B70

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=intel-arc-pro-b70-four&image=arc_pro_b70_2_lrg

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Crescent+Island

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=intel-arc-pro-b70-four&image=arc_pro_b70_3_lrg

[8] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=intel-arc-pro-b70-four&image=arc_pro_b70_4_lrg

[9] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=intel-arc-pro-b70-four&image=arc_pro_b70_5_lrg