Remember what Azul used to do: make customized multicore Java appliances. An Azul machine might have 60 or 100 cores and there was all sorts of cleverness to take advantage of the parallelization (the one that impressed me was the optimistic locking: a thread that was supposed to obtain a lock just assumed that it had the lock and went forward and if it turned out later that, no, it was supposed to have blocked, it somehow unwound all its changes and went back and waited).
The problem is, of course, that custom hardware is a graveyard. Azul had spent all this time making software for hardware no one would buy. So, as a corporation they imitated their own product: they backed up, unwound their changes, and ported all their clevernesses (the optimistic locking, the hypervisor, other stuff) from custom hardware to commodity multicore machines so instead of paying $100,000 for an 80-core machine, you can spent $20,000 for 10 eight-core machines in a cloud*.
[ * All numbers surgically extracted from my anatomy. ]
Is it a good idea? Does it work? I don’t know, but I hope so. I met all the Azul guys at the 2003 JavaOne and they really impressed me.