WSJ has a story on work being doen by Intel towards embedding virtualisation in chips.
Paul Otellini, Intel’s president and chief operating officer, disclosed that the the company is working on a technology — code-named Vanderpool — that helps a personal computer run different kinds of operating software at the same time. That technique, sometimes called virtualization, has long been used on mainframe computers, and can help isolate a system’s hardware from problems caused by viruses or software glitches.
Start-ups such as VMware Inc., a closely held company in Palo Alto, Calif., sell virtualization software now. But using special-purpose chip circuitry to help isolate the software can significantly improve performance, Mr. Otellini said. During a keynote speech, the company demonstrated a PC that continued to play videos while an Intel executive rebooted a separate operating system to download some game software.
This is very interesting – we want to make a server appliance which can run Windows and Linux simultaneously.
