Some thoughts on VMs and their relevance (or lack thereof) to a Nintendo console. I'm getting a PhD in distributed systems/operating systems, which doesn't mean I know what I'm talking about at all, but I'd like to think it makes my uninformed BS have a slightly higher chance of being accurate:
I think you've got it the wrong way. This tech means one machine can fake being 8 different machines rendering graphics independently. I don't think it would help multiple physical devices share resources in any way.
Yep, you're spot on that this tech doesn't seem too useful in a console/handheld. One video-game related use that I could see for it, though, is being used in the server farms powering cloud gaming/game streaming. Those games are probably already running on VMs, so I can see the appeal in having a chip with low power consumption/heat output that works well with rendering graphics in virtualized environments.
Again, virtualization doesn't help multiple physical devices combine their resources. Precisely the opposite--it helps one physical device fake being multiple computers simultaneously. The idea of running software in a virtual environment, and using that virtualization to make it easier to develop software across iterative releases, is interesting, though. My gut instinct is that it would be easier to just have software development use a set of common libraries that are recompiled to any new architecture, since getting good performance out of virtualization takes a lot of tweaking anyways, but I don't know enough to have a firm idea of what the advantages and disadvantages of each approach are.
Virtualization would do nothing to improve performance for running something like AI, and it would probably actually hurt performance significantly (there's the raw performance penalty of virtualization, and now your 7 AI processes on your 7 different VMs have to pass messages back and forth to communicate with the main game VM).
