Intel working on hardware virtualization: codename Vanderpool

Taken from a CNet article:

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker wants to take advantage of the huge number of transistors on the microprocessors coming out in the next few years. The company plans to produce chips with two or more processor cores–the calculating engine inside a chip–and make chips that can function as two processors, company President Paul Otellini said Tuesday morning at the Intel Developer Forum here.

A chip technology that will be available within five years, code-named Vanderpool, will allow users to partition the processor inside their computers. In a demonstration, Otellini used a PC to beam an episode of “The Simpsons” to a plasma TV, while another Intel executive booted and rebooted a game with the same machine.

“What we are doing is creating virtual machines inside the microprocessor,” Otellini said. “You can run multiple versions of Windows or different operating systems.”

Conversely, Intel will release Montecito, an Itanium chip that will be Intel’s first dual-core processor, in 2005 and follow it with Tanglewood, a future version of the Itanium family of chips for servers that will contain multiple cores.

The dual-core concept also will show up in the Xeon line in the form of Tulsa, which will be released in about three years. Xeon is based on the traditional x86 architecture, which differs from the Itanium architecture.

Yeah, I know it’s an old news but never reported before in my blog, so here it is.