Intel's 65 nm Process Breathes Fire into Double-Core Extreme Edition

Virtualization Technology

One of the new features Intel adds in 2006 is Virtualization Technology. The Pentium D 900 series and the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 come with VT support.

Virtualization is one of the hot topics for 2006. While there are software solutions that act as a master operating system in order to run several operating system instances in parallel (virtual machines), hardware support is both faster and more secure. A processor that supports virtualization technology supports additional instructions that allow for adding an abstraction layer to control multiple OS instances. These so-called Hypervisors are capable of managing multiple operating system partitions and usually offer a console solution to switch between these.

The most obvious applications would be server environments where virtualization technology can be used to run multiple virtual server instances on a single machine to save costs (systems, energy, maintenance), duplicating a whole operating system partition for redundancy reasons or rapid server deployment for software development