The metaverse will require “A 1,000-times increase in computational efficiency” according to Intel

Senior vice president and general manager of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group at Intel, Raja Koduri has said that the metaverse will require, “A 1,000-times increase in computational efficiency”.

Writing in a blog post called ‘Powering the Metaverse‘ Koduri says that, “The metaverse may be the next major platform in computing after the world wide web and mobile”. Citing advances in CGI – as well as VR and AR – he observes that, “The once-in-a-lifetime pandemic has forced many to rely on digital technology as the only way to communicate, collaborate, learn and sustain our lives”.

A petaflop for you and you and you…

Looking ahead to persistent online presence – complete with realistic clothing, hair and skin tones, all rendered in real-time for hundreds of millions of users simultaneously – Koduri is of the opinion that, “Our computing, storage and networking infrastructure today is simply not enough to enable this vision. We need several orders of magnitude more powerful computing capability, accessible at much lower latencies across a multitude of device form factors. 

“Truly persistent and immersive computing, at scale and accessible by billions of humans in real-time, will require… a 1,000-times increase in computational efficiency from today’s state of the art”.

And what would that kind of power look like? According to Koduri, “We believe that the dream of providing a petaflop of compute power and a petabyte of data within a millisecond of every human on the planet is within our reach!”

It’s-a-me: Koduri!

To accomplish this, Koduri argues that, “The entire plumbing of the internet will need major upgrades”. Intel’s work to this end is divided into three areas: meta intelligence, meta ops, and meta compute. In turn, these will progress a unified programming model and software development tools; infrastructure to remotely deliver compute power to users; and the raw horsepower necessary to power these metaverse experiences.

Koduri points to advances across transistors, packaging, memory and interconnect, as well as new algorithms and software architectures to deliver the metaverse of the future. He says, “Today’s internet was able to transform our world because it was built upon open standards. At Intel, we are committed to plumbing the internet of tomorrow by leveraging and augmenting existing industry standards as well as creating new ones”.