Interview with Intel’s Raja Koduri: Zettascale or ZettaFLOP? Metaverse what?

We currently live in a sea of buzzwords. Whether that’s something to catch the eye when scrolling through our news feed, or a company wanting to latch their product onto the word-of-the-day, the quintessential buzzword gets lodged in your brain and it’s hard to get out. Two that have broken through the barn doors in the technology community lately have been ‘Zettascale’, and ‘Metaverse’. Cue a collective groan while we wait for them to stop being buzzwords and into something tangible. That’s my goal today while speaking to Raja Koduri, Intel’s SVP and GM of Accelerated Computing.

What makes buzzwords like Zettascale and Metaverse so egregious right now is that they’re referring to one of our potential futures. To break it down: Zettascale is talking about creating 1000x the current level of compute today but in the latter half of the decade, to take advantage of the high demand for computational resources by both consumers and businesses, and especially machine learning; Metaverse is something about more immersive experiences, and leveling up the future of interaction, but is about as well defined as a PHP variable.

The main element that combines the two is computer hardware, coupled by computer software. That’s why I reached out to Intel to ask for an interview with Raja Koduri, SVP and GM, whose role is to manage both angles for the company towards a Zettascale future and a Metaverse experience. One of the goals of this interview was to cut through the miasma of marketing fluff and understand exactly what Intel means with these two phrases, and if they’re relevant enough to the company to be built into those future roadmaps (to no-one’s surprise, they are – but we’re finding out how).

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