This is the second part of the interview between The Inquirer and Intel's Pat Gelsinger: 

What about virtualisation? Like Victor Kiam, Intel liked it so much it bought (a chunk of) the company when it paid $218.5m for 2.5 per cent of VMware, earlier this year. It's a sobering thought for would-be competitors that Intel has already made more out of that investment than many well-known companies will turn over this year, but, with one eye on lost server sale opportunities maybe, Gelsinger isn't getting carried away with the hypervisor hype.

"We believe it’s still in its infancy and has a long way to go. Less than 10 per cent of servers use it in any form and we haven’t scratched the surface in client."

Further out, load balancing, failover, redundancy, even mission-critical computing stand to gain and the resulting clusters could be “more robust than a mainframe”, he says, but it's early days and the competitive landscape is not overly, well, competitive.

"VMware has been the only game in town," he notes. "Before we would have said it was a three-horse race with XenSource and Microsoft, but [they] haven’t really showed up for the race."

Is VMware going to stay the 800-pound monster though? Maybe not, thinks Gelsinger, pointing, without prompting to Parallels and Virtual Iron as well as renewed efforts from Citrix-XenSource and Microsoft's Viridian.

Read the entire article, here.