[citation][nom]joeman42[/nom]It is one thing to say in the abstract that "business" needs XPM for legacy apps, though in all fairness this may be true for many. But as an individual (who does not have a VT capable system) I don't have any use for this and I suspect that is the case for most (hmmm, might be a good QOTD). Either way, this is a crutch and I hope it is not exploited as a means for companies to avoid developing their product's capabilities or their staff's skills.[/citation]
When Wine has decent Direct X 9 support,
you can just use Linux with wine on any computer (on which Linux runs) with almost native performance. It makes Linux actually have a windows API where applications can run in with almost native performance, direct X 9 support is not yet available.
It's a way better solution then virtualization if the only thing you need to get some windows XP applications running. Best thing of all, it's free!
For business that depend on legacy applications, virtualization is needed and processors with virtualization support are a big deal.
Once tried hardware accelerated virtualization on a Intel Core 2 Duo
6300 @ 1.86 GHz. It ran way to slow, beyond usable.
Virtualization is more than just have or have not.
It is also about the functions that are hardware accelerated that make virtualization capable hardware good or not usable.
(e.g.: memory management, nested virtualization support, ...)
It would be interesting to see a benchmark, with all the processors.
With hardware accelerated virtualization on and off.
Compared with native Windows XP and to finish Linux + Wine.
What is Linux? It's an OS like windows or Mac OS X,
subdivided into compatible distributions.
What is wine? Is a slightly more complicated question to answer:
http://stason.org/TULARC/os/windows...at-is-Wine-and-what-is-it-supposed-to-do.html
Wine is a program which allows the operation of DOS and MS Windows
programs (Windows 3.x and Win32 executables) on UNIX. It consists of
a program loader, which loads and executes a Windows binary, and a
library that implements Windows API calls using their UNIX or X11
equivalents. The library may also be used for porting Win32 code into
native UNIX executables.