Intel’s RMS (recognition, mining and synthesis) taxonomy¹ offers a way to describe a class of emerging applications. This issue of Intel Technology Journal (Vol 9, Issue 2) discusses a small subset of RMS applications to help the reader understand the nature of such applications. In turn, the reader will understand the high-level platform requirements for these workloads and the implications for processor platforms of tomorrow.² The technology underlying these applications is likely to have broad applicability to a wide range of emerging applications with mass appeal in various market segments including digital enterprise, digital home, and digital health.

The wave of digitization is all around us. While none of us has a crystal ball to predict the future “killer app” (any new application with universal appeal), it is our belief that the next round of applications will be about solving the data explosion problem for end-users, a problem of growing concern for both enterprise and home users. Digital content continues to grow by leaps and bounds in various forms, including unstructured text on the web; digital images from consumer cameras to high-definition medical images; streams of network access logs or e-Commerce transactions; and digital video data from consumer cameras and surveillance cameras. Add to this massive virtual reality datasets and complex models capable of interactive and real-time rendering, and approaching photo-realism and real-world animation.

Recognition is a type of machine learning which enables computers to model objects or events of interest to the user or application. Given such a model, the computer must be able to search or mine instances of the model in complex, often massive, static or streaming datasets. Synthesis is discovering “what if” cases of a model. If an instance of the model doesn’t exist, a computer should be able to create it in a virtual world.

Beyond its use as a taxonomy, RMS offers an integrated view of underlying technologies. Traditionally we have treated ”R,“ ”M,“ and ”S“ components as independent application classes. For example, graphics (a form of synthesis application), computer vision, and data mining are traditionally considered independent, stand-alone applications. However, an integration of these component technologies, if achieved real-time in an iRMS (interactive RMS) loop, may lead to exciting new usages. For example, consider a virtual dressing room which lets you use an archive of apparel and images, and create various synthetic combinations of these, or a further extension to richer forms of real-time reality augmentation. Processor platforms of today still have a long way to go before the compute power reaches the required level for these applications, which in many cases go well beyond teraflops. However, it is our belief that this dawn of tera-era³ has an unprecedented value proposition to the end user in terms of significantly increased visual realism, and productivity in the face of the digital data explosion.