Intel VP Lisa Pearce recently said that the company would announce/release the first Arc Alchemist GPUs on Wednesday, March 30. One of team blue’s senior engineers, Bob Duffy, took to YouTube to showcase the new hardware’s abilities inside of Blender. Most of the video isn’t explicitly about the GPU, but it implies some cool things. First up, Blender is being updated with a new hardware acceleration setting designed explicitly for Arc GPUs. Duffy said we could expect this feature in a Q2 Blender build. Also, although there’s no way to take specific performance metrics from the video, the GPU is pretty snappy with the renders. Most importantly, it works fluidly without bugs or artifacts, which is pretty good for pre-production silicon combined with beta software. Meanwhile, Intel’s other marketing team is teasing a “new member” of the 12th Gen processor family, the Core i9-12900KS. In a tweet, they said they’d showcase it inside some featured builds on April 5. As the name implies, the 12900KS is a binned 12900K. It has the same 16 cores and 24 threads and all the same physical specs. It’s a bit faster, though, with a 5.5 GHz “enhanced thermal velocity boost” clock, up from the 12900K’s 5.2 GHz non-enhanced boost. Newegg accidentally listed the processor for $799 last week, $185 more than the 12900K. If it’s supposed to compete with AMD’s upcoming flagship, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, it would be wise for Intel to launch theirs first because team red’s chip is rumored to arrive at around $450.
