Quoting from The Inquirer:
During IDF, AMD had a bunch of things going on, from indoors to overhead, and even a virtualisation panel.
The point of this was to talk about everything but Pacifica and Vanderpool, but a crowd of vicious journalists will manage to drag things out anyway.
There were some things that came out, the first of which was that there will be a Pacifica spec that comes out ‘before the end of the month’. Hopefully, they mean March, but it wasn’t specified as such.
The next bit was that it isn’t totally compatible with VT, or at least that is the strong impression I get. When you ask the question ‘is it compatible’, and you get the answer ‘well, isn’t the weather nice today, how long are you in SF for?’, it becomes clear that they don’t want to say no in public.
AMD did say that its version would be better because it would support all the things that make the K8 line unique. HT, embedded memory controllers, and all the bells and whistles should make for a whopping good time for all the VMM writers out there. With any luck, Pacifica will make it easier.
The last bit was how it plans to introduce it in phases. Before you can buy silicon, most likely around the end of the year, you can get all the Pacifica goodies in Linux. Those that are not gifted with a large corporation that gets alpha silicon, say EMC and MS, will get a dev kit in the form of Xen and Open Hypervisor. Open in front of Hypervisor is new to me, but in any case, you will get a plugin that enables the silicon to function when it comes out.
Overall, specifics lite, and comparison free, but tidbits to be had. In a few weeks, we may get the full story, but then again we may not. Either way, the hints are trickling out.