The term “metaverse” is becoming a new buzzword of widespread interest. This emerging concept has sparked great controversy.

Some argue that the metaverse is a technology bubble created by Western capitalists and tech giants, a rebranding of social media or online games. Others believe that the metaverse has the potential to become the next generation of the Internet and will be the ultimate integrated platform for many of today’s cutting-edge technologies.

As one of the main promoters of the metaverse, the U.S. social media giant Facebook portrays the metaverse as a new digital landscape.

In these visions, the metaverse is a virtual space that is highly interactive and tightly integrated with the real world. In this space, users will be unable to distinguish the difference between virtuality and reality, and will be able to access knowledge and realize their creativity with unprecedented breadth and depth.

Although this description seems to be exaggerated, it contains the four basic characteristics of the metaverse: enhanced digital experience, open interactive space, parallel interconnection with the real world, and user-driven design. These features make the metaverse different from the existing digital consumer products and digital ecology, and to a certain extent, it has a broader development space. This is the main reason why metaverse is favored by some companies and experts.

The rapid development and predictable prospect of the technology and device applications on which the metaverse is based is another reason why it is receiving attention at this time.

It is widely believed that 5G, virtual reality, augmented reality, blockchain, machine vision, digital twin, brain-computer interface and other technologies and application devices are the main technologies that metaverse relies on. These technologies can be integrated to form a virtual space similar to the real-world sensory experience and interaction convenience, greatly enriching the breadth and depth of the virtual space and enhancing the credibility of the digital space. Most of these technologies have moved from the experimental stage to a rapid development and technology diffusion.

However, the above positive factors do not mean that the metaverse has become an inevitable reality.

From history, people usually have overly optimistic expectations about technological revolutions and new rising technologies. For example, in the 1980s, Japan attempted to devote all its national efforts to pioneer the development of a fifth-generation computer that would enable natural language processing capabilities that are still beyond the reach of today’s artificial intelligence. Japan chose a completely different logic architecture and programming language to achieve this revolutionary innovation, but in the end, it proved far more difficult to implement and the entire project ultimately failed.

The metaverse faces similar risks in three main ways:

First, at the technical level. Although the technologies mentioned above have developed significantly, there is still a great uncertainty whether these technologies can be successfully integrated into the same platform and digital ecology. In the integration process, the metaverse may have many technical loopholes and defects, leaving the relevant products and applications in a highly unstable state, far from people’s initial expectations.

The second is at the level of technical substitutability. The metaverse is not an inevitable direction for the future development of information technology and digital ecology, but only one of the potential options. Metaverse competes with IoT at some levels. Both of them jointly seize the communication channel of 5G and also try to solve the problem of integration of the real-world and virtual world at different levels.

The IoT has many functions and benefits that the metaverse cannot achieve, and the maturity of the IoT industry will make the real world smarter and strengthen the real world’s overriding position over the virtual world.

Finally, it is from the level of user acceptance. Whether the metaverse can be widely accepted is the key to become a revolutionary product or an optional consumer product. From the past promotion of digital consumer products, products with higher immersion effects and richer experiences are more difficult to be widely promoted: “less is more” applies here as well.

Previously, Sony had tried to launch virtual reality devices based on its game platform but did not get the expected response. The user base of the tile-matching video game is much larger than other more visually appealing games. Likely, metaverse will not be able to adapt to the diverse digital consumer tastes of today’s world.

These three uncertainties make the metaverse a distant lottery that will not be drawn for many years and has no real value for the ordinary people to participate in. However, this lottery also has a huge potential value that makes some countries and companies determined to devote all their efforts to buy it out.

At the national level, this potential value is mainly reflected in the revaluation of some national endowments. The core competencies of the metaverse are content innovation and cultural intellectual property with international appeal, national capabilities, and assets in the cultural sphere, which have long been overlooked by people and capital but have created an enormous value.

Once the meta-universe is realized, these cultural soft powers will be further revalued and may become one of the national powers on par with the strategic significance of political appeal and economic power. South Korea and Japan, which have invested in cultural soft power for many years and have developed strong international competitiveness, are also the countries in the world today that attach the most importance to the metaverse.

At the corporate level, this potential value is mainly reflected in the establishment of a next-generation digital ecology that transcends the existing regulatory framework.

Companies supporting the metaverse generally emphasize the user-centered, decentralized and apolitical concept of the metaverse, trying to realize a digital ecology in the metaverse similar to that of the European city-state era with individual households and digital workshops, and further expanding the stakeholders of the digital ecology. In Western countries, this new model will expose government regulation to greater and more direct social resistance. Facebook, currently in the regulatory limelight, is a natural flag bearer for promoting the metaverse.

These strategic values make it important to take the metaverse seriously, though with doubts, and require careful observation of its development and changes. Countries and companies need to prepare accordingly for the metaverse, but they also need to consider whether they need to participate in it or bet on it based on their circumstances. For the individuals, understanding the concepts and having abilities to participate in the metaverse development are wonderful, but expecting to strike it rich in the metaverse business is not wise.

_{(Source: Le Big Data, Business Insider, Siècle Digital, Clubic, facebook)}

On December 14, at the OPPO INNO DAY 2021, OPPO released its first self-developed chip MariSilicon X, which is OPPO’s first self-designed, self-developed image-specific NPU chip.

“With more than a decade of experience in pushing the boundaries of image technology, OPPO has been behind some of the biggest innovations in the industry when it comes to camera modules, lenses, and algorithms,” said Jiang Bo, OPPO’s Senior Director, during the event. “Our new cutting-edge imaging NPU is the biggest leap we’ve taken so far, which brings more power to mobile imaging systems and will create an extraordinary experience for our users.”

As the first NPU chip dedicated to imaging, MariSilicon X is based on the new golden architecture concept of DSA for the future AI era. In 2019, Turing Award winners John Hennessy and David Patterson published the article “The New Golden Age for Computer Architecture,” proposing that when Moore’s Law no longer applies, a more hardware-centric design mindset, problem- and domain-specific architecture DSA will rise.

The predictions of computer architecture giants have become an important developing trend in the industry, and in the recent hot Chinese chip sector, there are already startups putting AI acceleration chips in the form of DSA into servers. OPPO’s MariSilicon X, on the other hand, is geared towards computational imaging on the cell phone, with an integrated, fully self-developed MariNeuro AI computing unit that provides ultra-high computing power and the industry-leading energy efficiency ratio.

The chip has four major technological breakthroughs: powerful real-time AI computing power efficiency, industry-leading Ultra HDR capabilities, lossless real-time RAW processing, and RGBW Pro to maximize sensor capabilities.

First is OPPO’s completely self-developed AI computing unit, MariNeuro, which is a scenario-defined chip computing architecture that enables high AI energy efficiency. Compared to the more versatile NPU, OPPO’s DSA focuses on solving the chip’s imaging capabilities, so it can reach 18TOPS (INT8) of computing power. The A15 chip on Apple’s iPhone 13 Pro, launched a few months ago, has 15.8TOPS, which means that MariSilicon X has achieved the industry’s top level.

OPPO has an AI noise reduction algorithm for tasks such as night photography, and the Snapdragon 888 on its Find X3 Pro processed 4K images at 2 frames per second with 1.7W consumption. With the MariSilicon X, the same algorithm processes at 40 frames per second with only 797mW consumption, halving the power consumption and increasing 20 times performance. The AI algorithm that was used to process photos can now be used to process video directly.

OPPO provides a dedicated on-chip memory subsystem for the AI computation unit, with a maximum throughput of trillions of bits per second, more than ten times the maximum throughput of current cell phone memory. Inside the chip, each IP also has a dedicated DDR bandwidth of up to 8.5GB/s.

Beyond the architecture, OPPO has integrated a fully self-developed MariLumi image processing unit into the chip, which can process 20bit images and enable cell phone photography with a 1 million to 1 HDR brightness ratio.

From the camera receiving light to the final display on the screen, the cell phone image is the result of a complete chain of joint efforts. OPPO believes that the core of computing images is how to open up the synergy of various processing modules. In the past, sensors, common platforms, and imaging algorithms have not evolved at the same pace. With the MariSilicon X, OPPO has achieved the first vertical integration of the imaging chain in the industry.

OPPO gave several examples of integration: image processing needs to go through the RAW domain, RGB domain, YUV domain and finally is projected to the screen, and the raw data loses certain data with each domain. Computational photography usually processes YUV domain content because it requires less computational power. With the addition of MariSilicon X, the AI algorithm performs lossless RAW domain processing in real-time, allowing the computational processing to be front-loaded, enhancing image detail.

And with the dual-path design, MariSilicon X enables the first separate processing of RGB and W pixels, maximizing each pixel’s characteristics and unlocking the full potential of the customized RGBW array. Its RGBW Pro mode delivers an 8.6dB increase in signal-to-noise ratio and a 1.7 times increase in resolution, resulting in enhanced images with no change in sensor specifications.

For OPPO, the new standard in computational photography is the combination among 4K images, lossless 20bit RAW computation, and pure images from AI, and rich layering from Ultra HDR’s extreme dynamic range. The MariSilicon X will allow 4K video capture on Android phones, for the first time, with the addition of AI capabilities.

OPPO’s self-research chip program has been in place for three years now, first revealed in February 2020. OPPO founder and CEO Chen Mingyong said that the company will continue to invest significant resources in the future, continuing its path of self-research chips with a team consisting of thousands of people.

The final question is which phone will be equipped with the MariSilicon X. OPPO said that in the first quarter of 2022, the self-developed chip will debut with the next generation of Find X series.

_{(Source: OPPO, Sparrowsnews)}