Recently Intel VP Lisa Pearce said that on Wednesday, March 30, Intel would announce/release the first Arc Alchemist GPUs. On YouTube, one of team blue’s senior engineers, Bob Duffy, showcases the new hardware’s capabilities inside of Blender.
In the video, there aren’t many details about the GPU, but it indicates some cool things. First up, Blender is being updated with a new hardware acceleration setting designed especially for Arc GPUs. Duffy said we could anticipate this feature in a Q2 Blender build.
Although there is no method to take exact performance metrics from the video, the GPU is pretty fast with the renders. Most importantly, it works fluidly without any bugs, which is good news for pre-production silicon combined with beta software.
Meanwhile, Intel’s other marketing team is also teasing a “new member” of the 12th Gen processor family, the Core i9-12900KS. In a tweet, they stated, on April 5 they will showcase it inside some featured builds.
As the name indicates, the Core i9 12900KS is the same lineup as Core i9 12900K. It has the same 16 cores and 24 threads and all the same physical specifications. The 12900KS is a bit faster, it can boost up to a 5.5 GHz “enhanced thermal velocity boost” clock, as compared to the 12900K’s 5.2 GHz non-enhanced boost.
Last week Newegg accidentally listed the Intel Core i9 12900KS CPU for $799, which is $185 more than the Intel Core i9 12900K. If it’s considered to compete with AMD’s upcoming flagship, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, it would be better for Intel to launch their CPU first because the Red team’s chip is rumored to come at around $450, which is very less than the Blue teams CPU.
