Building the metaverse may be all the rage, but at least one Intel exec says computational power must increase significantly to make it a reality.

“Metaverse” is a term that refers to the convergence of virtual, augmented and in-person reality. The metaverse is widely considered to be the next major step in computing, with Facebook even changing its name to Meta in preparation.

Unfortunately, Raja Koduri, Senior vice president and General manager of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group at Intel, says computing is going to have to significantly increase in order to power the metaverse.

Truly persistent and immersive computing, at scale and accessible by billions of humans in real time, will require even more: a 1,000-times increase in computational efficiency from today’s state of the art.

Koduri says the same applies to the internet, with improvements needed to handle the additional bandwidth demands of the metaverse.

We need several orders of magnitude more powerful computing capability, accessible at much lower latencies across a multitude of device form factors. To enable these capabilities at scale, the entire plumbing of the internet will need major upgrades.

Despite the challenges, Koduri believes the required computing power is within reach.

This technology that enables immersive virtual worlds to augment the real world opens up so much possibility and it is what keeps me excited to work every day. We believe that the dream of providing a petaflop of compute power and a petabyte of data within a millisecond of every human on the planet is within our reach.