News AMD set to detail multi-OS plan

news.com reports on AMD's Pacifica technology, which according to the company will make running several OS's on one box easier:

SAN FRANCISCO--Advanced Micro Devices will detail its "Pacifica" virtualization technology by the end of this month, enabling software companies to start working with the feature, which makes it easier for a computer to run several operating systems simultaneously.

The Pacifica technology is scheduled to arrive in processors in 2006, later than the comparable Vanderpool Technology--now officially called Intel Virtualization Technology--that is promised to appear this year in Intel chips. What's not clear is whether the two technologies will be compatible, raising the prospect of complications for some software makers.

"We're going to be releasing the specification for Pacifica publicly by the end of this month," said Margaret Lewis, AMD's senior software strategist, at a meeting last week. "Once the spec is out, we can have a lot of conversations about Pacifica versus other specs."

More here

 

This just seems crazy to me.

Wouldn't it be far more efficient and stable to come up with some sort of "universal" code that can run on any system? What happened to the concept behind Java... aside from it being slightly different on every platform?

Nezuji

 

Because one of the operating systems people will undoubtedly be wanting to run (Windows) is owned by "the man" (Microsoft) who really would prefer that you run their OS and only their OS. It would not make good sense for them to make life easy for the consumer to run it alongside a different OS (such as linux)

Unfortinately nearly the entire market is driven by money, not the desire for technological advancement

 

Well yes, obviously there's Mr. Bill to contend with But I'm thinking that MS will probably find some way to detect this system, assuming that they don't find a way to crush it with their muscle before it even gets off the ground.

I guess I feel that the mobo/CPU developers have the opportunity to develop a chipset which translates code from some open standard to processor-specific instructions (akin to Transmeta's Crusoe line running x86 code) and allow them to compete more easily with each other at the same time as blowing the whole software market wide open, but instead they're taking a route that enables the mega-corps like Microsoft to retain their hold on software development. Maybe it seems like the path of least resistance but I doubt that any of these companies is going to see this as any less of a threat.

Nezuji