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Image: Playback/YouTube
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In recent months, the metaverse has gained a captive space in the international news due to the universe of possibilities that technology can provide.
However, many people are forgetting a “small” detail: do we have the infrastructure to run this gigantic digital world?
According to Intel, not yet! The semiconductor chip giant claims that if we put together all the computing, storage and networking infrastructure, it still doesn’t have enough power to support the metaverse vision propagated by Mark Zuckerberg last October.
Not only that, but the company says that building a real-time accessible metaverse for billions of humans would be necessary. increase by 1,000 times the computational efficiency we have today.
“We need several orders of magnitude more powerful computing power, accessible at much lower latencies in a multitude of device form factors.” (Raja Koduri, senior vice president and head of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group)
The Intel executive says that before enabling the metaverse at scale, major updates will need to be carried out on the internet. Advances in transistors, packaging, memory and interconnection will be needed, as well as new algorithms and software architectures.
Other complications
As much as the metaverse is in fashion – being even pointed out as the successor of the mobile internet – it should not have such a fast and massive adoption as many think.
One of the main bottlenecks is that users will need to invest heavily in virtual and augmented reality goggles, as well as motion capture gloves. Not to mention the other technologies that will still be developed to enable access to the metaverse.
These technologies are still very expensive, with prices being reduced only if the big companies behind the metaverses start to subsidize this equipment.
It is worth remembering that one of the reasons that Second Life did not succeed in the recent past is that not everyone was able to invest in a good PC to run the game. Furthermore, the low connection speed at the time was also a limitation.
However, Intel still remains confident that it will participate in the development of these new technologies for the metaverse.
“We believe the dream of delivering a petaflop of computing power and a petabyte of data to one millisecond of every human on the planet is within our grasp.” (Raja Koduri)
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