Microsoft's Palladium: What the heck is it?
ZDNet | at | by Mike
Palladium. It's the newest word in our Microsoft vocabulary, but hardly anyone knows what it really means. Published reports so far have told us that it's Microsoft's new "trustworthy computing" architecture, and that we'll have to buy new computers and updated software to run it. But beyond that, it's hard to tell what, exactly, Palladium is. I want to take a shot at changing that. Though the details are still sketchy, here's my first attempt at a Palladium FAQ.
What is Palladium?
Palladium is not a separate operating system. Rather, it consists of enhancements to the Windows kernel and to hardware, including the CPU, peripherals, and chipsets. Together, these enhancements will support a trustworthy execution subsystem within the PC--think of it as a very secure little computer inside your larger, insecure one.