Cycles X announced

The Blender Foundation has taken the opportunity to use Cycle’s 10th anniversary to announce Cycles X, a new project that will update the renderer to take advantage of modern algorithms and hardware. According to the announcement, the project’s aim is to “refresh the architecture and prepare it for the next 10 years. Rather than finding quick fixes or optimizations that solve only part of the problem, we’re rethinking the architecture as a whole”. To serve that aim, the project has  4 broad goals: to improve the architecture for future development, to improve the usability of viewport and batch rendering, to improve performance on modern CPUs and GPUs, and to introduce more advanced rendering algorithms. You can see some of the progress that’s been made already in the videos below and read more about the initiative on the Blender website.