This week, Intel’s marketing teams are working overtime to promote the mobile Arc Alchemist GPUs as well as a new flagship desktop CPU, the i9-12900KS.
They made a Bender video to give us a taste of Arc, and it looks like it’ll be a fast-paced ride.
Intel VP Lisa Pearce recently stated that the first Arc Alchemist GPUs would be announced/released on March 30. Bob Duffy, one of Team Blue’s senior engineers, came to YouTube to demonstrate the new hardware’s capabilities within Blender.
The majority of the film isn’t specifically about the GPU, but it does imply some interesting stuff. First and foremost, Blender has been upgraded to include a new hardware acceleration preset optimized for Arc GPUs. This feature could be included in a Blender build in the second quarter, according to Duffy.
Also, while there’s no way to extract particular performance data from the movie, the GPU renders quickly. Most significantly, it runs smoothly without any glitches or artefacts, which is impressive for pre-production silicon and beta software.
Meanwhile, Intel’s other marketing team is promoting the Core i9-12900KS, a “new member” of the 12th Gen processor family. They claimed they’d show it off inside some featured builds on April 5 in a tweet.
The 12900KS is a binned version of the 12900K. It has the same 16 cores and 24 threads as the previous model, as well as the same physical specifications.
With a 5.5 GHz “increased thermal velocity boost” clock, it outperforms the 12900K’s 5.2 GHz non-enhanced boost clock.
Last week, Newegg listed the processor for $799, $185 more than the 12900K. If it’s meant to compete with AMD’s impending flagship, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, Intel would be prudent to release it first, as AMD’s CPU is expected to cost approximately $450.
To read our blog on “Intel is set to release the world’s first 16-core processor for laptops,” click here.
