Ever since Facebook announced its name to Meta and pivot to the metaverse, nearly every other big tech firm has jumped on the bandwagon, aiming to create their own persistent and immersive digital environment.

For Intel though, building a metaverse is about more than simply slipping on a pair of VR goggles and chatting to mates online, and in order to deliver a true metaverse experience, a lot more computing power is required.

This according to Raja Koduri, SVP and GM for Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, who penned an opinion piece this week unpacking his thoughts on the subject.

“There are reasons to believe that we are on the cusp of the next major transition in computing,” enthuses Koduri regarding the potential of the metaverse.

“We need several orders of magnitude more powerful computing capability, accessible at much lower latencies across a multitude of device form factors. To enable these capabilities at scale, the entire plumbing of the internet will need major upgrades,” he advises.

And here is where a pinch of salt is needed as Koduri begins to highlight some of the developments that Intel is making in this field, giving this opinion piece more of a marketing feel.

Nevertheless, it is good to see that Intel recognises the requirements to empower a metaverse in the future, positioning itself as a potential leader in terms of the technology that brings these persistent digital ecosystems to life.

“Intel’s building blocks for metaverses can be summarized into three layers and we have been hard at work in several critical areas,” he explains.

“Within the meta intelligence layer, our work focuses on a unified programming model and software development tools and libraries that are open in order to enable developers to deploy complex applications more easily. The meta ops layer describes the infrastructure layer that delivers compute to users beyond what is available to them locally. And finally, the meta compute layer is the raw  horsepower necessary to power these metaverse experiences,” Koduri continues.

As such, a true metaverse is not necessarily on our doorstep as Meta and Microsoft are saying, but could be on the horizon if Intel and other technology companies like continue to develop the necessary architecture.

“Truly persistent and immersive computing, at scale and accessible by billions of humans in real time, will require even more: a 1,000-times increase in computational efficiency from today’s state of the art. Many advances across transistors, packaging, memory and interconnect that will help are in the pipeline,” he concludes.

[Image – Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash]