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Intel Excited About Virtual World’s Demand For Computing Capacity

by Darren

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Intel hasn’t had that much to be excited about in the world of personal computers lately. The PC business has settled down to where most people have enough horsepower for their needs. But in the world of Virtual Worlds, there can never be enough computing capacity. Games like Second Life aren’t that big yet, but when people come up with even more compelling worlds, then the demand for Intel’s products will be insatiable.

Intel has also eagerly anticipated some processor-taxing technologies that have come to fruition, including streaming audio and video, and some that haven’t, such as speech recognition.

Rattner showed statistics that indicated a PC’s processor bumps up to 20 percent utilization while browsing the Web, while its graphics processor doesn’t even break above 1 percent.

Intel CTO Justin Rattner
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

But running Second Life–even with today’s coarse graphics–pushes those to 70 percent for the main processor and 35 to 70 percent for the graphics processor, he said. The Google Maps Web site and Google Earth software pose intermediate demands.

Running a virtual worlds server is vastly more computationally challenging, though, when compared with 2D Web sites and even massively multiplayer online games such as Eve Online. An Eve Online server can handle 34,420 users at a time, but Second Life maxes a server out with just 160 users. Network capacity also is much more heavily used.

The worlds also demand a ton of mathematical computations, so the companies running the servers will need to make huge investments into their infrastructure. And that is something that Intel is truly excited about.

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