Vanderpool is not a swimming pool for aliens

At Intel’s Fall IDF in 2003 Paul Otellini announced and demo’ed (what a construct) VT or Vanderpool Technology. In short Vanderpool allows more then one OS to run on a single processor w/o interference. Why am I writing about it? This week we got notice of a change in dates for delivery of this technology. It is coming earlier. In fact they announced availability for this year, 2005.

More about Vanderpool:

- https://www.intel.com/technology/computing/vptech/index.htm

- For IA32

- For IA64

And AMD?

A while back when Intel Vanderpool/Silverdale story was kind of new, AMD also announced their virtualization technology codenamed “Pacifica”. Network World Fusion wrote in November last year: “… Advanced Micro Devices plans to build security and virtualization features into its server processors by 2006, the company said during its annual analyst event this month. Two initiatives, called Pacifica and Presidio, are underway at the chip maker, said Fred Weber, AMD's CTO. Pacifica is a virtualization technology, while Presidio involves security features, but further details were not disclosed. ...” Weber’s deck is here.

And Microsoft?

At least from Intel we know that Microsoft may have plans to support Vanderpool in the Longhorn timeframe. No official statements out of rainy Redmond yet. Interested in the topic I met with a colleague of mine (Hardware Technical Evangelist) last Friday to chat about the whole virtualization story. As assumed, at some point Microsoft will support Vanderpool-like virtualization techniques. Current status/plans? Only on a need-to-know basis.
Anyhow I learned about a few key aspects like Hypervisor, Enlightening (spelling?) and a few other. I will share some more details and insight in the future.