[ale] OT: AMD Athlon 64

[Greg Freemyer]

On 5/5/06, John Wells <jb at sourceillustrated.com> wrote:
> Guys,
>
> My brother-in-law is in the market for a new MB/Processor, and looking at
> the AMD Athlon 64s based on price.
>
> I've been too long out of the hardware game to make sense of the various
> types (Venice, Newcastle, etc).
>
> Anyone out there know of a good, easy-to-digest treatise on the subject?
> What would you recommend?
>
> Thanks, as always!
>
> John

I don't remember the AMD terminology name for the new Virtual
Technology, but both Intel and AMD seem to be in the process of adding
VT to their product lines.  VT is a big deal because it allows Xen
line systems to have very low overhead even with Windows as a guest
OS.

Xen, VMware, MS Virtual PC, Vista?,  etc. are all adding VT support to
their products.  I suspect a year from now a lot of people will be
running a Linux Host OS with Xen and a WIndows Guest OS on VT enabled
hardware.

See the chart at
http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/proc_info_table.pdf to
see which Intel CPUs have the VT feature.  I don't know if AMD has a
similar chart.

If your brother-in-law is interested in running Linux, but needs some
Windows functionality, I would advise buying hardware that will let
him take advantage of this emerging trend.

Greg
--
Greg Freemyer
The Norcross Group
Forensics for the 21st Century