A picture is often worth a thousand words, or maybe not.
The keynote from Chipgigant Intel for the Consumer Electronics Show 2022, in short: CES, was perhaps one of the most eagerly awaited. After all, the company plans to have Nvidia and AMD in the parade this year and to stir up the market with its own dedicated graphics cards for gamers. The presentation has only just ended, but unfortunately we are not really much smarter than before when it comes to the Arc Alchemist accelerators.
Intel’s Executive Vice President Gregory Bryant mainly had news about the notebook processors of the Core i-12000 series up his sleeve. They should of course be clearly superior to the competition from AMD. What kind of presentation would it be if it wasn’t made abundantly clear.
Intel Core i9 12900KS
And also with the desktop processors, Intel wants to counter AMD. The arch rival had opposed the Core i9 12900K at its own keynote three hours earlier with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D.
AMD at CES 2022
AMD shows Ryzen 7000 in action for the first time
Now Intel brings the Core i9 12900KS into play. Obviously, this is a particularly well-selected version of the regular 12900K, which has one or two cores at the top of 5.5 GHz. All-core, to be precise: according to the presentation, 5.2 GHz are possible on all performance cores at the same time.
The specs of the Core i9 12900KS at a glance:
| Core i9 12900KS | Kerne/Threads: 16 (8P + 8E)/24 | Takt (P-Core): 3,2/5,2 GHz | Turbo 3.0 (P-Core): 5,5 GHz | Tact (E-Core): 2,4/3,9 GHz | PL1/PL2: 125/241 Watt |
| Core i9 12900K | Kerne/Threads: 16 (8P + 8E)/24 | Takt (P-Core): 3,2/5,1 GHz | Turbo 3.0 (P-Core): 5,2 GHz | Tact (E-Core): 2,4/3,9 GHz | PL1/PL2: 125/241 Watt |
Intel Arc Alchemist
As mentioned at the beginning, there is unfortunately very little new information about the graphics cards. The accelerators from the Arc Alchemist series are currently on their way to OEM partners. Asus, Dell, Acer, Lenovo and Co. already have over 50 designs in planning for both notebooks and desktop PCs.
However, the keynote does not reveal exactly when we will have our first graphics cards in our hands. There is also nothing new about the actual performance data and prices. A picture with a notebook and the very vague information: Intel Arc Coming in Q1 2022
only confirms what is already known.
Competition for Nvidia and AMD
When will Intel’s graphics cards appear?
Intel XeSS
There is a little more to report about Intel’s DLSS counterpart XeSS: One of the first games with support for the AI upscaler will be the Definitive Edition of Death Stranding. There we also have the opportunity to have XeSS compete against DLSS. In addition to Death Stranding, Hitman 3, The Riftbreaker, Grit, Dolmen, Super People and Grid Legends will also offer support for XeSS.
IIn contrast to DLSS, XeSS is not only reserved for graphics cards from Intel, but can also be used on accelerators from Nvidia and AMD, as long as they have the instruction set DP4a
dominate. This is the case with Nvidia from GTX 1000 and with AMD from RX 6000.
