Recently Microsoft had announced a big feature of Windows 7, “XP Mode†as most call it. This allows people to install all their favorite XP software that won’t run in Vista or 7 in a XP virtual pc. Or at least as it was supposed to work, but many people with Intel processors won’t be able to use this feature. Microsoft is requiring that the computer on which 7 is installed to have hardware virtualization support. Since VirtualPC that the XP mode uses is a software hypervisor the decision makes no sense.
AMD processors have AMD-V (hardware virtualization) on all but their Sempron line. Intel on the other hand used the feature as a way to divide their processor models and don’t have as many models with the support. Tom’s Hardware has a list of all the Intel models that support VT-x.
Source: ArsTechnica
