As Linux becomes more competitive with Windows from a user experience point of view, I wonder if superior support for these new crazy AMD processors might help give it a boost. I'm sure many graphics people would move (if only Linux had good support for applications like Photoshop).
I'm curious what performance would be like on a linux hosting a 128 thread windows VM. I expect it to be worse than running windows on the bare metal, but maybe not. I could see a series of deficiencies in windows being eliminated with the linux host -> windows client topology.
I assume that the issue with processor groups on windows is that something somewhere is hardcoded to represent some kind of per-CPU state as bits in machine word. Having some kind of hypervisor as an additional layer will not help with that.
