AMD RD890,RS880, and RX880

[2senile]

This is a bit old but it gives a basic outline. Worth reading the whole thing. It's short.

http://forums.amd.com/devblog/blogpost.cfm?catid=317&threadid=99513

Why is it important?

In virtualization, there are lots of tricks done to abstract the underlying hardware, but also to minimize virtualization overhead. Using Rapid Virtualization Indexing(tm) instead of shadow page tables for memory management is only one example. The biggest remaining performance gap in today's virtualization scenario is I/O. An IOMMU helps to bridge this gap and also improves the situation from a security point of view. Last, but not least, it allows hypervisors to be simpler and more robust.

I'll have a wild guess that it might also allow a larger number of VMs.

@ hoom
Virtualbox 3 has "experimental" 3D acceleration. It was a bit flaky when I tried it but I only slammed it on 32bit Win' 7 for a look.

 

[Fox5]

Means you can run a virtualised old OS for legacy games instead of having to dual boot.
At least, thats what has piqued my interest.

Alternatively, I can run Windows Vista/7 for games, and still have my flavor of linux running smoothly and with full 3d support (or at least good enough for doing basic development in opengl).