The idea that tomorrow's big supercomputers could revolutionize our technological environment has a somewhat 1960s feel to it. But despite that, the arms race to build the metaverse is anything but in the past.
If the metaverse's most hopeful projections come true, it will be due to a bunch of good old-fashioned processing power.
Consider the enormity of the technological challenges imposed by a metaverse: A theoretically infinite number of users engaging in real time in a continually changing virtual world.
In an extensively circulated blog post this year, Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist who launched a fund of metaverse-related equities, claimed that it will demand "the greatest ongoing computational requirements in human history."
In a December essay, Intel VP Raja Koduri stated that "a 1,000-times increase in computational efficiency" is required.
This has real-world ramifications. Even a small version of the metaverse would result in a massive increase in dem...