Intel® Virtualization Technology (T5500/T7200...)

Different models/configurations involve Intel® Core™2 Duo processor T5500/7200/... getting more costy as the number goes up. I'm ignorant about this. According to

http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/chart/core2duo.htm

they mainly differ in the availability of "Intel® Virtualization Technology".
How important is it (esp. relative to the corresponding $$$ increase in customization)? (trying to weigh in the worthiness and the cost) Will appreciate any words of explanations!

 

You use a VM? Basically running another operating system inside a window. VT makes them faster.

 

Thanks aaa. How much faster is T7200 than T5500? Example?

 

one of the reasons i bought thinkpad is they enable VM. Many companies like vaio disable themin default and wont let me use VM

 

Actually Lenovo has the extensions disabled by default as well. You can very easily enable them in the bios though.

 

ok, Ill bite. what does the bios have to do with VM? I use VM to run a second copy of xp to play with (install crapware and test programs) and I run it inside Ubuntu to have access to xp. How does this feature help?

 

VM != VT.
VT accelerates the VM. The VM will run either way, just slower. And apparently Sony and a few others like to irreversibly disable it.

 

How come?

 

Dunno... there was a thread somewhere with lots of speculation, like them thinking it was unstable or something. Or maybe it had to do with that security scare brought up by Rutowska... who knows, I don't think Sony ever officially said why.

 

If I don't play games and rarely watch movies (but do listen to music a lot), would the difference between T5500 and T7200 be obvious?

 

Nope.

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Great. Thanks

 

does anyone have a link on info to enable it? I tried searching and read the first 10 pages but i have not found anything that talks about it being disabled or how to enable it?

 

bios...............

 

One of the best features is that you can run 64-bit operating systems on a 32-bit OS (on T5500/T7200)

And about the performance, we have not noticed any advantages with this technology, not at all.

We have compared Parallels 2.2, VMWare 5.5.x/6.0.0 and VPC 2007 under x86/x64 Vista and Windows Server 2003 R2 which hosted both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 R2 and Windows Server 2008 (CTP) compiling applications under VS2005 and compiling the Axapta 4 (under 32-bit), and could not see any difference in speed :-/ We even tried Virtual Box and VMWare 5.5.x under Linux, but did not find any performance boost that was maybe supposed to be given by Íntels Virtualization Technology.

However, if anyone wants to make an _unfair_ test and compare the crappy VPC 2007 with VMWare or Parallels so.. well, go ahead! We have not benchmarked them, but the VPC feels like a snail compared to VMWare, Parallels or Virtual Box (do not know so much about the Virtual Box yet; do not even know if it supports Virtual Technology..)

Some people talk about faster bootup times in the virtual environment, but for just a few seconds faster bootup, do I really need to say WOW?? Nah..