Viper is called Zerynth today: https://wiki.python.org/moin/Zerynth
Zerynth is a development suite. Notably, it makes use of a VM.
Viper is just one of the code emitters buried inside the MicroPython source code, like here [0]. Notably, it produces native code, not bytecode for a VM.
[0] https://github.com/micropython/micropython/blob/master/py/ob...