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Intel says metaverse will require 1,000 times more computing power

According to Intel, all the players who gravitate around the metaverse today seem to forget that our current technology is far from being able to handle a metaverse on the scale that Mark Zuckerberg dreams of.

Since Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his latest craze, the Metaverse, all of Big Tech seems to have embarked on a race to conquer this virtual space – and it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t even exist in concrete terms yet. Moreover, it is probably not for now according to Intel. The firm believes that the technology is simply not ready.

In a press release spotted by The verge, the blue team believes that in order to set up a virtual infrastructure as ambitious as that imagined by Zuck ‘, we would have to further increase our computing power … by a factor of one thousand, just that. A positioning not necessarily surprising; after all, he is a smelter who makes his butter on raw power. But the argument is not without foundation for all that.

Truly persistent and immersive computing, at a scale that allows billions of humans to access it together in real time, will require a 1000-fold increase in the efficiency of our best machines today.”, Explains Raja Koduri, vice president of the Architecture, Graphics and Software branch of Intel.

A reserve which is more or less swept under the carpet by a good part of the industry at the present time. Yet it could not be more legitimate. Because if lots of companies rush to show their new concepts adapted to this future metaverse, many seem to completely ignore the fact that its technological foundations are not even in place yet.

One point of Koduri’s analysis, however, deserves to be slightly qualified. At present, no one, and possibly even Mark Zuckerberg, expects to see a platform capable of accommodating “billion”Of humans. This technology will necessarily be built over time, from much more modest bases. Some even claim that there are already several forms of “metaverse”, although quite rudimentary compared to Meta’s vision.

The metaverse is not yet for now

On the other hand, it is also very true that the network infrastructure that could accommodate such a system simply does not exist today. Virtual reality is by definition a fairly greedy technology in terms of computing power. And in the context of the metaverse, it would not only be necessary upscaler all this to welcome millions of users, but also to offer them content of unprecedented quality in complete fluidity.

For Koduri, this would imply “compelling and detailed avatars with lifelike clothes, hair and skin, all rendered in real time and based on data from sensors that capture real world objects, gestures, audio, and more”. There will therefore necessarily be a need for systems with “Extreme transfer speeds, and incredibly low latencies”.

You might as well say it right away; It is not tomorrow that the planet will have an infrastructure capable of handling such a load on such a vast scale. To approach it, Koduri suggests instead taking the path of AI and software. He explains that the software architectures and algorithms that we currently have cannot withstand such a load permanently; he therefore believes and that there is certainly material to optimize them. But whatever the approach, the observation remains the same; The metaverse as envisioned by Zuckerberg is not yet for now.

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