Leading chipmaker Intel has stressed that building Metaverse — at scale and accessible by billions of humans in real-time — will require a 1,000-times increase in computational efficiency from what we have today.
Raja Koduri, senior vice president and head of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, said that our computing, storage, and networking infrastructure today is simply not enough to enable this Metaverse vision popularised by Meta (formerly Facebook) and other companies.
“We need several orders of magnitude more powerful computing capability, accessible at much lower latencies across a multitude of device form factors,” Koduri said in a blog post.
To enable these capabilities at scale, the entire plumbing of the internet will need major upgrades, he added.
The term Metaverse was coined by Neal Stephenson in a science fiction novel almost 30 years ago.
In recent years, the metaverse has come to represent a utopian convergence of digital experiences fuelled by Moore’s Law – an aspiration to enable rich, real-time, globally-interconnected virtual- and augmented-reality environments that will enable billions of people to work, play, collaborate and socialize in entirely new ways.
“Indeed, the metaverse may be the next major platform in computing after the world wide web and mobile,” Koduri said.
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.
The Intel executive argued that the explosion of decentralized digital finance technologies inspires business models that encourage everyone to play a role in creating these Metaverses.
Social media giant Facebook has said it would spend more than $10 billion to build out its vision for Metaverse.
Facebook has announced hiring 10,000 people to help the social network build the Metaverse.
According to the company, the next computing platform has the potential to help unlock access to new creative, social and economic opportunities
