And here's the next update! 
-------------------Bringing Hyper-V to “Windows 8”------------------- This post details the built in Hyper-V virtualization coming with Windows 8. It's a pretty technical post, but it's great to hear about the native virtualization support none the less. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hyper-V requires a 64-bit system that has Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). SLAT is a feature present in the current generation of 64-bit processors by Intel & AMD. You’ll also need a 64-bit version of Windows 8, and at least 4GB of RAM. Hyper-V does support creation of both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems in the VMs. [...] For storage, you can add multiple hard disks to the IDE or SCSI controllers available in the VM. You can use Virtual Hard Disks (.VHD or .VHDX files) or actual disks that you pass directly through to the virtual machine. VHDs can also reside on a remote file server, making it easy to maintain and share a common set of predefined VHDs across a team. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ And here's a full video demonstration for some of the features included:
-------------------Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8------------------- This blogpost details all the work that's been done to improve the boot time and the "fresh start" experience you get from a reboot. The results are quite impressive! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Our challenge then, was to design a way to meet all of these desires on today’s PCs without requiring some special new hardware. These were our goals: [...] Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. [...] Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested). [...] Another important thing to note about Windows 8’s fast startup mode is that, while we don’t do a full “Plug & Play” enumeration of all drivers, we still do initialize drivers in this mode. Those of you who like to cold boot in order to “freshen up” drivers and devices will be glad to know that is still effective in this new mode, even if not an identical process to a cold boot. This new fast startup mode will yield benefits on almost all systems, whether they have a spinning HDD or a solid state drive (SSD), but for newer systems with fast SSDs it is downright amazing. [...] Of course, there are times where you may want to perform a complete shutdown – for example, if you’re opening the system to add or change some hardware. We have an option in the UI to revert back to the Windows 7 shutdown/cold boot behavior, or since that’s likely a fairly infrequent thing, you can use the new /full switch on shutdown.exe. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ And here is the video showcasing their results:
I timed the boot to around 8 seconds (!), and in the comments on the blog, the hardware detailed to be "an EliteBook 8640p (Intel® Core™ i7-620M, 8GB, 160GB SSD).", so pretty high end, but very impressive none the less!
