AMD and Intel are agreed on one thing this year — virtualisation is in. With AMD's Pacifica and Intel's VT both due to see widespread deployment in 2006, there's not much time left for those who don't know or don't care about the implications of a technology that for once will genuinely change the rules.
It's not new, and so far it hasn't been that exciting. Virtualisation's current list of PC achievements includes running multiple operating systems on one computer and letting developers bring back nuked systems from the dead with miraculous ease. Good stuff, but not the revolution in computing that its proponents persistently promise.
Yet all that will change once virtualisation becomes widespread. Security will change as virtual machines naturally operate in high isolation, free from interference and the power to interfere. They're also entirely visible from the outside — there is literally nowhere malware can hide, nor any way it can survive the casual destruction and reinstatement of a complete virtual computer. Manageability, flexibility and reliability can all be massively improved: a virtual machine is just data, and can be backed up, moved to new machines and remotely configured with ease. Hardware will cease to matter, in many important ways.
Which is not to say there won't be downsides. If the hypervisor — the software that manages the virtual machines — is compromised, the security consequences could be horrific. And hypervisors are the natural place to put digital rights management and trusted platform features; abuse of these ideas by companies, whether planned or through incompetence, could create insuperable problems. Hypervisors, we trust, will favour simplicity, robustness and minimal size over feature bloat.
No aspect of computing will be untouched by virtualisation: for once most of the hype that's coming our way will have a strong base in reality. There are differences between Pacifica and VT — and since AMD's architecture gives it more control over memory and I/O, there's a good chance that Pacifica will come out ahead in performance for some applications. Time will tell; benchmarking virtual systems in a meaningful way is going to be challenging.
And while Pacifica versus VT will open up a new front on the war of words between Intel and AMD, it's highly unlikely any significant product will appear with support for one and not the other — and soon enough, both will be standard across the board. In one way or another, we're all going to enter virtual reality.
