Software and tools to be developed will increasingly look towards enablement of “persistent and immersive” computing for the so-called metaverse, Intel has hinted.
Raja Koduri [pictured], senior vice president and general manager of the accelerated computing systems and graphics group at Intel, said in an opinion article for the vendor that future compute developments will enable billions of people to work, play, collaborate and socialise in “entirely new” ways.
“Indeed, the metaverse may be the next major platform in computing after the world wide web and mobile,” Koduri wrote.
“There are reasons to believe we are on the cusp of the next major transition in computing, a transition that will enable persistent and immersive computing at scale.”
Click here for a definition and background to the word ‘metaverse’.
Intel has been working on technologies that aim to harness compute, wherever it can be found, in a seamless way, Koduri noted.
The company points to advances that have already been made in computer-generated video and gaming, including virtual reality (VR) and augmented or mixed reality display — with much more development required to achieve fully immersive and persistent “experiences”, especially in real time.
“Our computing, storage and networking infrastructure today is simply not enough to enable this vision,” Koduri noted. “To enable these capabilities at scale, the entire plumbing of the internet will need major upgrades.”
Koduri said that Intel’s work on building blocks for metaverses can be summarised in three layers.
Within the meta intelligence layer, Intel is focusing on a unified programming model and software development tools and libraries that are open — enabling developers to more easily deploy complex applications.
New algorithms and software architectures will be essential, he pointed out, for a massively distributed computing environment.
Then there’s the meta ops layer or infrastructure layer that delivers compute to users beyond what is available to them locally. Intel is also investigating the meta compute layer to deliver the “raw horsepower” that will be needed to power metaverse experiences, Koduri explained.
“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,” he added.
“Many advances across transistors, packaging, memory and interconnect that will help are in the pipeline.”
