“The metaverse may be the next major platform in computing after the world wide web and mobile,” an editorial begins from Raja Koduri, a senior vice president and head of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group. But Koduri quickly pours cold water on the idea that the metaverse is right around the corner: “our computing, storage and networking infrastructure today is simply not enough to enable this vision,” he writes. Crucially, Koduri doesn’t even think we’re close. He says that a 1,000x increase in power is needed over our current collective computing capacity. A lot of the metaverse hype has been built around what you’ll do there, be it virtual reality meetings, digital concerts, and of course, blockchain and NFT-based integrations. And there’s plenty 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-rumored headset. But the actual building blocks of the metaverse aren’t just going to be software and virtual spaces (which, of course, is its own fight, given that today’s digital worlds are extremely self-contained) or even the headsets and gadgets people wear to “get” there. It’ll be in the computers and servers that run the vast shared virtual worlds the metaverse posits as the future of technology. And it’s there that Intel has the biggest reality check: today’s computers are just simply not powerful enough to make those dreams a reality. They’re not even close. Today’s computers aren’t even close to powerful enough for the metaverseOn the one hand, the statement here is almost laughably obvious. Meta’s flagship VR space, Horizon Worlds, maxes out at 20 participants for a space, and that’s for basic, Roblox-style animated worlds. The state of the art in VR still requires thousands of dollars of PC gaming hardware, with plenty of drawbacks (like requiring a tethered headset and graphics that still don’t measure up to what 2021’s best flatscreen games can offer). And even the biggest traditional video games that aren’t dealing with the added demands of VR like Fortnite or Battlefield 2042 can only handle up to 100 to 128 players at a time. As Koduri notes in his editorial, we can’t even put two people in a truly detailed virtual environment with today’s technology. “Consider what is required to put two individuals in a social setting in an entirely virtual environment: convincing and detailed avatars with realistic clothing, hair and skin tones – all rendered in real time and based on sensor data capturing real world 3D objects, gestures, audio and much more; data transfer at super high bandwidths and extremely low latencies; and a persistent model of the environment, which may contain both real and simulated elements.”And that’s just for two people — scaling up to the hundreds of millions of users that a Ready Player One, Snow Crash, or Matrix-style metaverse concept would require much, much more computing infrastructure. Of course, Intel also has a vested interest in saying that we need more and better computers and servers. After all, Intel makes CPUs (and soon, GPUs) for consumer devices and data centers alike. And if the metaverse — the hottest buzzword technology of the future — needs a literal 1,000x increase in computing capacity, well that’s just good for business. It’s no coincidence that Intel explicitly called out both its client compute and cloud processors and graphics products in its metaverse brief.
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