I wonder if they're trying to eliminate the VM substrate layer that clouds today currently run on by replacing it with hardware and an OS that is more amenable to running containers natively with good isolation/security properties?
Nitro doubles down on VMs instead of abandoning them, but it is indeed a good example of what integrated hardware and software can do.
What they did with Nitro is develop custom PCIe devices to handle storage and networking, so these devices' virtual functions (SR-IOV) are directly passed through to the VMs and now the hypervisor basically has nothing to do other than switching contexts.
