Intel reveals plans for the future

BEFORE KICKING OFF its massive developer forum tomorrow, Intel decided to brief the foreign press on its latest efforts in the field of virtual computing and what it called “bridging the digital world with the virtual world”.

Noting that in 2007 alone, over one billion dollars had been invested by venture capitalists in virtual worlds, Intel fellow and director of tera scale research computer programming, Jim Held, said Chipzilla was currently making very real efforts to muscle its way into the emerging (and apparently lucrative) field of connected visual computing. Held said the company was even going as far as rethinking some of its architecture to better adapt devices to improve the “naturalness of simulation”.

With a current market of 303 million users worldwide and a projected one billion users in the next few years, virtual worlds are starting to represent a lot more than just virtual dollars to the company. Of course, the more simulated environments like virtual worlds grow, the greater the performance demands which need to be addressed, and these are costly.

Scene complexity, a growing user base and ever-increasing demand for greater realism all do their bit to increase bandwidth, up CPU usage and require an ever-growing number of servers. But Held reckoned that Intel's research would smash through those technical barriers and others, enabling widespread adoption of connected visual computing in the very near future.

For this to happen, Held said the firm was working on various ways to make it easier for users to create and share their own 3d content, as well as exploring ways to bring CVC apps to mobile devices more effectively by balancing sensor processing between the device and a remote server.

Held also mentioned the company was collaborating with other industry players to help make rapid progress in the CVC field. Some of its research also purportedly builds on previous Intel research into Tera-scale computing, including the 80 core research processor. µ