The Meshverse Journal

While commenting on how the computer is being dematerialized I thought about the evolution of Cisco as well as Intel’s $21M acquisition of physics software vendor Havok and was tempted to entitled this entry Intel - the Software Company. However, in the interest of keeping things flowing with The Rise of the 3D Internet reviews, I thought I’d place these thoughts in the context of Justin Rattners observation that much of what we use computers for is to simulate the world around us. It’s an interesting transition Intel is having to make from their hardware perspective. In building his case for just how more demanding 3d simulations are, Rattner first shows the 2D simulation loop in operation on the web today:

Now you might be thinking “ah ha - so we don’t really need 3D for simulation” but that’s another story, as is the relationship to Sun’s Lively Kernel. Rattner compares the 2D loop with the 3D one

and makes the case that:

• for the user’s computer, virtual worlds demand at least 3 times the computing processing power and 20 times the graphics processing power compared to 2D web pages

• due to the demands of ad-hoc, user-generated content, virtual worlds require at least 100 times as much bandwidth as online games

• for virtual world servers, there’s a 10-100 times greater demand for computational power than for conventional games

At first glance these numbers seem to be very compelling, but it would be nice to see some additional analysis based on more distributed architectures. At Intel the software company, hardware would be a by-product(albeit still a very profitable one) of creating solutions.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 12:15 am and is filed under Cisco, Intel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.