One foundational thing we always knew is that for what we imagined in Snow Crash, what we imagined in Ready Player One, for those experiences to be delivered, the computational infrastructure that is needed is 1000 times more than what we currently have.
So the [personal computers] are getting better, the phone is amazing these days, you’ve got a two-teraflop GPU [graphics processors] in the phone… and then you have cloud. There’s lots of progress made, but it is not enough.
Your thesis is that there’s a lot of hype around the metaverse, who’s going to build it, and what’s going to look like. But before we get to that, chipmakers need to build the infrastructure layer.
Yes, exactly… What I have been in pursuit of for the last five years is preparing the computational framework necessary for the metaverse. You need to access to petaflops [one thousand teraflops] of computing in less than a millisecond, less than ten milliseconds for real-time uses.
We’ve been working in the background on the roads and highways and the train lines you need, assuming this civilization is going to happen. When roads are being built it’s exciting but after that, nobody cares about it. And that’s where we want to get to. Once this is all built, you’ll have your fun in the metaverse.
Why is this the first time that Intel is talking about the metaverse publicly?