Among Silicon Valley’s hottest buzzwords, the metaverse reigns supreme. Coined by Neal Stephenson in the 1992 novel Snow Crash, the metaverse is a next-generation immersive internet experienced through augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR).
The concept of the metaverse has inspired the tech industry for decades. Long after the virtual world Second Life popped up in the mid-2000s, gaming companies like Epic Games (maker of Fortnite) and Roblox have started describing their worlds as an early version of the metaverse. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg changed Facebook’s parent company name to Meta signaling his intention to design the new immersive internet in its image.
Yet few chip companies have gotten in the game. They’re crucial to making the metaverse a reality. Relative to the enormous computing demand for fully immersive virtual worlds, today’s chip are underpowered. They’re also in short supply: supply chain woes mean the semiconductor industry is months behind on delivering enough chips for everything from video game consoles to cars.
So far, only one chip manufacturer, NVIDIA, has announced that it is is building a platform for metaverse. Called Omniverse, its chips are designed for “connecting 3D worlds into a shared virtual universe.”
Now Intel is entering the conversation. Intel will release a new series of graphics processors starting in the first quarter of 2022, which it announced in August 2021, and says will power the metaverse. Intel’s Raja Koduri, who leads Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, said in an exclusive interview that the computing power of today’s chips will need to improve 1000-fold to power the metaverse.
Koduri spoke about the path to the metaverse, his vision for what it will look like, and how Intel wants to help build it ahead of his public remarks at the RealTime Conference on Dec. 13.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.