Vanderpool & Pacifica; what will they do for me?

[xbdestroya]

With the new year will come Intel and AMD's virtualization on the desktop technologies. Now, for myself I'm an AMD man so I know more about the AMD side of things here - introduction on M2, higher-end feature for their chips, etc etc...

Anyway I'm not going to be running multiple OS's or anything on that order - is there something I'm missing here then as to how these features might be of benefit to me? Comparing it to my other socket/CPU options and narrowing the discussion down to this particular feature for the time being.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Well, it may turn out that Vanderpool, Pacifica is not at all useful to you. The features touted are:
-Ability to run multiple OSes simultaneously, which brings the ability to:
*In the future have multiple users using one physical system
*If the computer gets a virus or something, it can manage with the other partition without shutting down the computer entirely, one OS may get shut down while one may not have to.

 

[coomar]

or you could run solaris and boot windows everything you want to play a game

though you could do that now

 

[xbdestroya]

Hmmm... good point. So I could run Linux or something and then just boot up Windows on a 'virtual' system to play games. Would it work that smoothly though? For some reason I see problems and hassles - but it is something I should have, but didn't, really think about before.

 

[Furen]

You can run multiple operating systems at the same time right now with virtualization software. What these two techs offer is a dramatic decrease in the overhead required by such programs. I'd be happy if the total overhead of running a second OS at idle is like 5%.

 

[batmanuel]

I think Apple is going to be all over this when they switch to Intel chips next year. The Yonah core chips they are likely to start out using support Vanderpool, so I think it is not unreasonable to suspect that they are working on a virtualization layer for their next version of OS X. It would be a huge boost to the Mac market if you could buy a Intel Mac machine and be able to pull open a copy of Windows that runs at almost full native speed when you need to run a program that does not exist on the Mac platform.

You can do the same now with Virtual PC, but you lose a lot of performance in the emulation process so you can't decently run a lot of damanding Windows apps like 3ds MAX or games from within VPC. With Vanderpool, you might be able to run HL2 at almost full speed on a properly equipped Mac, which would remove a HUGE barrier to Mac adoption by PC users.

It may just be wishful thinking on my part, but with the first Intel processors Apple is using on retail machines most likley being Vanderpool-enabled Yonah core chips it seems like a no brainer for Apple to do this in OS X 10.5 or 10.6.