Intel Invests $218M in VMWare, Preparing for IPO

RulerOf writes "TechNewsWorld is carrying an article detailing that Intel has made an investment in VMWare for $218.5 million in anticipation of VMWare's imminent IPO. With an expected value of $23-25 a share, VMWare's IPO shows a value of $950 million. This investment brings Intel to an approximately 13% ownership of the EMC subsidiary, and helps to strengthen ties between the two companies. According to the article, 'VMware's virtualization platform runs on Intel architecture and most deployments of the tools are on systems using Intel chips.'"

Comments

Re:Intel AMD

[Richard W.M. Jones]

My only hope is that Intel doesn't skew it's architecture so much that it becomes incompatible and that AMD is left behind. Would be nice if AMD could partner up as well, or create a consortium for "next gen architecture and virtualization enhancements" kinda like how MMX, SSE etc came about for graphics.

Too late - it's already happened. Intel and AMD have incompatible virtualisation technologies. Intel's is called VT with various sub-designations such as VT-d for virtualising DMA. AMD's is called AMD-V and is completely different. AMD have sub-divisions too, such as support for Nested Page Tables which Intel are still developing.

Xen supports both. Not certain about VMWare, but I'd be surprised if they didn't support both too. One interesting fact is that hardware virtualisation isn't faster than software approaches like VMWare's emulation or Xen paravirtualisation. Although this will probably change in future (and also Xen paravirt is no good for you if you want to run Windoze or other binary-only OSes).

Rich.