This is either going to be a brilliant idea or an expensive flop. A startup called Soft Machines came out of stealth mode at the Linley Processor Conference on Thursday, showing off an architecture it calls Virtual Instruction Set Computing (VISC).

The company proposes doing virtualization at the CPU level, instead of the OS level like it’s currently done. Virtualized servers still have to load the hypervisor before they load the operating systems. The operating system or hypervisor then does the allocation of resources.

One of the advantages of VISC is that it can take more than one physical CPU core and use it to process a single task. This automatically parallelizes the code, even if it wasn’t written to be multicore or multithreaded. This would be a huge boon for programmers, as writing code to operate in parallel is very challenging and requires a skilled programmer.

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