Promising to bring hardware and software-based virtualization capabilities to AMD64 servers, AMD today released the full specifications of its virtualization technology "Pacifica". At the LinuxWorld Summit, AMD corporate vice president and general manager Marty Seyer outlined the benefits of virtualization for businesses of varying sizes, and said that the consumer would also benefit.
Virtualization will enable users to concurrently run multiple operating systems and applications in independent partitions of a system. Mainframes have had this kind of technology for some time, now AMD plans to bring it more into the mainstream. Software and hardware technologies work together in AMD's Pacifica to help reduce complexity and increase security of new virtualization solutions.
AMD plans to make Pacifica available in the first half of 2006. Intel, of course, has its own virtualization strategy called "Vanderpool", which will be available in Itanium processors later this year.