California-based multinational corporation and technology company, Intel has for the first time issued an official correspondence on the metaverse on Tuesday, affirming that the computing future aligns with an already connected virtual world that in parallel exists with our physical one.
But the U.S. based company highlighted an important point in its statement; it believes even with the adoption of metaverse ambitions, there’s not nearly enough processing power to go around.
The senior vice president and head of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, Raja Koduri who started the editorial said:
“The metaverse may be the next major platform in computing after the world-wide web and mobile. Our computing, storage and networking infrastructure today is simply not enough to enable this vision.”
Koduri further stressed that a 1,000x increase in power is required in the wake of the current collective computing capacity.
The COVID-19 pandemic had put the world on its toes, limiting movements, with different national governments announcing lockdowns to curtail the spread of the deadly virus. This forced many individuals, organizations to rely on digital technology as the only way to communicate, collaborate, learn and sustain our lives.
The Intel executive further opined that the rise of decentralised digital finance technologies is an inspiration for business models to push everyone to play a role in creating these Metaverses.
He noted that the building blocks of the metaverse won’t be just about software and virtual or even the headsets and gadgets people wear to “get” there, but will also be in the computers and servers that run the vast shared virtual worlds the metaverse posits as the future of technology.
Intel here sees this as the biggest reality check, with today’s computers simply not powerful enough to make those dreams a reality.
With the metaverse hype spiralling couple of months ago, especially with Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Inc. now Meta Inc. at the forefront of the project, culminating in a name change to allow an ‘intentional’ focus of building the metaverse, other tech giants and social media networks, like Apple and Microsoft are keying in to the initiative. The sensation and hype built around what you’ll do there, be it virtual reality meetings, digital concerts, and of course, blockchain and NFT-based integrations, with a lot of excitement about the future of virtual and augmented reality headsets, too, whether it be Meta’s Quest products (formerly known as Oculus) or Apple’s long-rumoured headset, the metaverse is nigh.