Virtual CPU

A virtuous CPU? That would be a CPU that didn't cuss, smoke, drink, or mess around.

sorry...

Probably what was meant is a CPU that is instantiated in an ASIC or FPGA, rather than as a real, hold-in-your-hand CPU. For some examples, click over to

"The brand new intel 3.06GHz CPU features intel's brand new "hyper-threading" technology, which allows the CPU to perform multiple proccessor operations, by way of creating a "virtual CPU". Although this technology doesnt give better performance under single program operations, it offers some outstanding results when running multiple CPU intensive programs." [

Found the above after a google search. There are probably more meanings depending on the context.

Could be a software simulation/emulation of a CPU. The simulation software embraces the CPU instruction set and allows one to test user software without actually using the CPU in question. Works pretty well, by the way, until one gets into the realm of tricky hardware interrupts and similar issues.

"Al Murphy" wrote

Or do you mean "Virtual Machine", IBM's VM system:

-- Nicholas O. Lindan, Cleveland, Ohio Consulting Engineer: Electronics; Informatics; Photonics. Remove spaces etc. to reply: n o lindan at net com dot com psst.. want to buy an f-stop timer? nolindan.com/da/fstop/

Or possibly that of VMware Inc?

DjBx