Intel's Raja Koduri: Enabling the Metaverse

Intel is committed to providing the technology foundation for the Metaverse, creating always-on, immersive connected experiences

(Raja Koduri, Intel senior vice president and general manager of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group)

The concept of "metaverse" first appeared in Neal Stephenson's science fiction nearly 30 years ago. In recent years, the metaverse has begun to be described as the ultimate dream of the digital world. Driven by Moore's Law, it will allow billions of users around the world to work, entertain, collaborate and socialize in a completely new way in the virtual reality and augmented reality world with rich information, real-time connection and global interconnection. The metaverse may be the next major computing platform after the World Wide Web and mobile Internet.

We are at the forefront of a new computing revolution, ushering in an era of continuous and immersive computing experiences. In today's movies, computer-generated animations are almost as good as real-life shots; the images in game scenes are also particularly realistic. VR and AR devices, which have developed rapidly in recent years, can also provide a very rich immersive experience. The sudden outbreak of the new crown epidemic has made many people rely on digital technology for communication, collaboration, learning and life. At the same time, "decentralized" digital financial technology has developed rapidly, which has promoted a new round of business model changes and encouraged everyone to play a role in building the metaverse.

For example, how can two users communicate in a virtual environment? This requires capturing 3D objects, gestures, audio and other information in the real world based on sensor data and rendering them in real time to create a highly realistic digital avatar with details from clothing to hair to skin color. In addition, we also need to transmit data with ultra-high bandwidth and extremely low latency, as well as maintain a continuously running environment model, which may contain elements of both the real environment and the simulated environment. Now, when we think about how to solve this particular problem at scale for hundreds of millions of users, we quickly realize that the current computing, storage and network infrastructure is not enough to support the realization of this vision.

This means that people's demand for computing power is growing exponentially, and they also need to access many different types of devices with lower latency. To achieve this goal, the basic technology of the entire connected experience needs to be significantly upgraded. Intel's technical cornerstones for enabling the Metaverse can be summarized into three layers, which are also the key areas we continue to deepen.

The meta intelligence layer aims to provide a unified programming model and open software development tools and libraries so that developers can more easily deploy complex applications. The meta ops layer focuses on delivering computing power beyond the local available computing power to users. The meta compute layer provides the raw power needed to realize the metaverse experience.

For decades, Intel® Core™ processors have been dedicated to providing excellent gaming experiences, and their excellent single-threaded performance makes rich gaming experiences even more powerful. Many of today's games, VR/AR experiences, and realistic animations in movies are realized on PCs and workstations equipped with Intel Core. In the cloud and data center, Intel® Xeon® processors are optimized for lower latency and higher throughput. In addition, Intel's processors for edge computing, infrastructure processing units, field programmable gate arrays, and 5G solutions bridge the gap from cloud to edge, which is critical for the large-scale distributed computing required by the metaverse.

The technological foundations needed to build the Metaverse are more than that. Intel's new Xe architecture can accelerate and render rich immersive experiences, and covers both the client and server sides, including Intel® Arc™ Alchemist graphics for games and creation, and Ponte Vecchio for accelerated high-performance computing and graphics, both of which will be available in 2022. In addition, our multi-generation high-performance XPU product roadmap covers clients, edges, and clouds, helping Intel achieve Z-level computing in the next five years.

To create a truly continuous and immersive computing experience and allow billions of users to access it in real time, we need to increase the existing computing power by 1000x. Behind the increase in computing power, Intel is planning and promoting many technological innovations from transistors, packaging, storage to interconnection. Recently, we also shared relevant content at the IEDM conference. To achieve this goal, in addition to hardware improvements, we also need new algorithms and software architectures.

Today’s Internet is changing our world because it is built on open standards. To that end, Intel is committed to providing the technology foundation for future connected experiences by leveraging and improving existing industry standards and creating new ones.

From immersive virtual worlds to augmented reality experiences, it is the empowerment of technology that has opened up more possibilities for us, and this is also the driving force for us to keep moving forward. We believe that the dream of allowing everyone to obtain 1 Petaflop (quadrillion floating-point operations per second) of computing power and transmit 1 PB (Petabyte) of data in 1 millisecond will eventually become a reality.