A couple of weeks ago, I bought the AMD 945 (4x 3GHz). The reason that I went for this vs. the Intel offerings was because it included AMD-V support (most or all AMD CPU's do), whereas Intel only includes their VT-x on some parts (and none at the quad-core price point that I was looking at). I use VMware on my desktop, and the virtualization instructions on the CPU seem like they should be important (but I haven't really researched it), and for me, it was worth having vs. what I considered to be at most a mild performance advantage.
AMD-V on the AMD offerings vs. no VT-x on the i5 is the only reason that I can see to still prefer AMD vs. Intel--and I am admittedly in a minority in terms of what I want in a CPU.
It would be an interesting followup to see an article looking at whether AMD-V is really an advantage...or is the i5 performance such that it can handle the overhead from not having VT-x and still be competitive with the AMD offerings for virtual computing (and then, of course, is that much further ahead on non-virtual computing tasks).
AMD-V on the AMD offerings vs. no VT-x on the i5 is the only reason that I can see to still prefer AMD vs. Intel--and I am admittedly in a minority in terms of what I want in a CPU.
It would be an interesting followup to see an article looking at whether AMD-V is really an advantage...or is the i5 performance such that it can handle the overhead from not having VT-x and still be competitive with the AMD offerings for virtual computing (and then, of course, is that much further ahead on non-virtual computing tasks).
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