GUID Partition Table & RAID & recovery

If RAID 5 is supported for booting an when you put so many disks together you ended up with a volume with more than 2TB of space. You can't boot from a volume larger than 2TB unless the BIOS supports GPT partitions (GPT = GUID Partition Table). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
Dell Command Line Interface (linux)
Intel Matrix Storage Manager
Recomendations on RAID controller 
Source
Update Jun 11, 2007: I have now experienced the downside to RAID and want to share my experiences here. I had disaster strike in April 2007. One of my two RAID drives was a refurbished drive and failed without warning. I do NOT recommend using a refurbished drive in any RAID array. I ended up with one after ordering an 'Open Box' item from Newegg. Apparently the term 'Open Box' can also mean 'Refurbished' - be careful! 
See A Case of Maxtaken Identity for the whole story.

The POST RAID Screen Showing RAID Failure

The Intel Matrix POST Setup Screen Showing RAID Failure
The death of the hard drive allowed me to experience first-hand how to recover from a RAID failure. After much research I decided that another Maxtor 6L250S0 drive was what I needed, although others did not agree with my choice. I stumbled across the fact that the drive was still under warranty. I received my replacement drive, a refurbished unit, and installed it. You will typically receive a refurbished hard drive when replacing a failed drive still under warranty.
Normally all one would have to do at this point is to plug it in, reconfigure the new drive in the Intel Matrix POST setup screen, reinstall Windows and let Windows rebuild the mirrored volume, but I took the opportunity to reconfigure my volumes. I learned from experience that my initial thoughts to maximize my disk space were flawed. I had a very large striped volume, but I just didn't have that much data that I was willing to lose. I backed up all of my data and set up the mirrored and striped volumes so that each had roughly half of the total final volume space. For my two 250 GB drives, this ended up being 150 GB for the striped volume and 158.7 GB for the mirrored volume.
As expected, everything on my striped volume (Vista and my installed apps) was lost. Nothing on the mirrored volume was lost, but I continue to follow a strict backup plan. I have my important files backed up to a third drive and also to DVD. I also export my MS Mail emails to the mirrored volume every week or two. The hard drive failure could have been a disaster, but thanks to my RAID and backup strategy, it was relatively painless to get everything back to normal again.
The downside to RAID? I have found that while writing to a file on a mirrored volume in Vista and a system failure or reboot occurs, the RAID volume may be in a 'Verify' state. When this occurred to me, one of the mirrored drives had to be verified or rebuilt. Vista took forever to start and when it did WIndows Aero was gone. It took over an hour to rebuild the 158.7 GB of hard disk space. I don't know what would have happened if the system shut down while writing to a striped volume, but I suspect it wouldn't be good and I have no desire to find out.
Another downside occurs if you cannot find a matching drive to replace the failed drive. If another Maxtor 250 GB 6L250S0 drive was not available, I would have had to buy two new drives to insure the proper operation of the RAID volumes. Also, if the motherboard were to die, I would have to find another motherboard with the same ICH7R Southbridge chipset in order to access the data on my RAID volumes/drives.
Both of these constraints are acceptable to me. I had a choice to go back to a non-RAID hard disk setup after the hard drive failure but I didn't. I really like using RAID and I can't tell you how happy and relieved I am to have my RAID working again.
Update Aug 16, 2007: I had to pull out my ancient Micron Milennium Pentium II PC and pull the 30 GB Seagate PATA drive out of my new computer and install it in the backup PC. See Adding Two GB of OCZ Platinum 4-5-4-15 Rev 1 SDRAM for the reason why. I had to wipe the drive and resort to installing NT on the hard drive. Since this was my boot drive in the new system, I had figure out how to get my boot loader reinstalled. I have both Vista RC1 and Server 2008 installed on separate partitions on two Maxtor drives configured as RAID 0 and RAID 1.
I have tried to repair my boot drive unsuccessfully in the past. This time I was determined to fix the boot loader without having to reinstall Windows. I found that I had to load the proper Intel AHCI RAID drivers before Windows Startup Repair could successfully fix the boot loader. If you have RAID installed, remember that you will need to do this every time you have to repair Windows startup.
Update Nov 4, 2007: A post to alt.comp.hardware was asking what the advantage was, if any, to having the Intel Matrix Storage Manager installed in Windows. I had been running a beta version of Server 2008 and after the last install forgot to load the Intel Matrix Storage Manager in the OS. I had been running Windows without the Storage Manager and without any problems for several months. So why would I want to install it? I decided to do a little bit of experimenting to find out what those benefits might be.
I have the OS on a striped RAID 0 volume. I downloaded the latest version of the Intel Matrix Storage Manager. It is a good idea to check there for the latest version.
I installed it and simulated a drive failure by unplugging the data cable to one of my SATA drives (don't try this at home - I am a highly trained professional, err rather a beta tester aka high risk taker) and not surprisingly the system locked up when trying to access Explorer. The storage manager did not tell me that one drive was missing from the array. This behavior may be different on a mirrored volume OS install.
So, no benefit there for me having the Storage Manager installed.
I rebooted the computer and noticed that the BIOS RAID screen showed RAID 0 as failed and RAID 1 as degraded. I entered the BIOS RAID configuration screen and there were no options there for me to 'fix' the volume errors.
I then continued to load Windows and got a balloon notification that one of the RAID volumes had errors. First I did a backup of my important data and then I started the Intel Matrix Storage Manager. It took a while for me to figure out how to 'fix' the arrays. I eventually figured out that I could Right Click on the hard drive that had an 'X' next to it and Left Click 'mark as normal'. I knew there had been no data lost (I was doing reads only) so this option should be safe. The missing drive and RAID 0 volume was marked as normal and the RAID 1 volume started the rebuild process.
I need to backtrack for a moment and explain what happens to your system when the RAID manager thinks that there is an error and you *don't* have the Intel Matrix Storage Manager installed in Windows. Anytime you have an abnormal shutdown and disk activity is occurring a subsequent restart of the RAID array will likely result in a rebuild of the RAID 1 mirrored array. While this process is going on, Windows will take about 15 minutes to start. In Vista, when it finally did start, the Aero interface was missing. For my 158 GB RAID 1 array, the rebuild process takes a full hour to complete.
I made the mistake of shutting down the computer during the restart after a BSOD. The next time I started the computer the dreaded mirrored RAID rebuild process started.
With the Storage Manager installed you can initiate this rebuild process from within the storage manager and *not* automatically during Windows startup. This alone is an excellent reason to install the Storage manager.
The storage manager has good information about your drives and RAID arrays. The storage manager also allows you to create a RAID array and a RAID array from an existing drive.
I would highly recommend that you install the Storage Manager in Windows because sooner or later your system will not shut down normally. When that happens you don't want to wait for the array rebuild process to grind on and on and on before you can start using your computer.
Oh yes - one more thing. When I loaded the latest version of the Intel Matrix Storage Manager, Windows told me that I had 3 days to activate due to a hardware change. There was no hardware change, but the good news is that the activation from within Windows worked without having to make that annoying activation call to Microsoft.
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Editorial Privilege

This is the section where I am allowed to stray from the facts, give my opinions and feelings, ramble a bit and make speculations and inferences.
I narrowed my choice of motherboards down to a final three:
MSI P975X Platinum
Foxconn 975X7AB-8EKRS2H
GIGABYTE GA-965P-DQ6
I sent emails to the technical support people of each manufacturer. They all basically said the same (I believe accurate) information that the motherboard may not be stable with the memory running at 800 MHz and for the 975X boards, the memory was not technically supported by the Intel chip and for the 965, the memory would have to be overclocked and may not be stable. But none of them told me what I was looking for. To their credit, all three were honest and quick with their replies.
The matrix I had built pointed to the Foxconn as the best choice, but I threw that out for a while and considered them separately based on my Internet research. The MSI customers had reported a lot of BIOS problems and the Gigabyte looked promising, but overpriced. I really wanted the DS4 and not the DQ6, but that motherboard was not available in North America as of late September 2006.
The long name of the motherboard ultimately leads one to shorten or nickname the name when referring to it. I call this the Abbie Kersh board. Actually, all of those letters and numbers mean something:
975X7AB-8EKRS2H

975X - the Northbridge chipset

7 - the socket type (775)

A - the form factor (ATX)

B - the revision number (2)

8 - eight channel audio

E - IEEE 1394

K - Gigabit LAN

R - RAID

S - SATA

2 - memory type (DDR2)

H - ROHS compliant

The Intel 975X Northbridge chip does not technically support DDR2 800. This means that in order to run any DDR2 800 memory, you are over-specing any 975X motherboard. From my ECS P965T-A webpage:
So who is to blame for all of this memory / motherboard compatibility issues? Newer BIOS releases have improved this problem greatly, but end users are still reporting problems. The retail sites should include any memory voltage requirements with a disclaimer that memory modules requiring more than 1.8 Volts are not technically supported by the Intel 975 chip and that they memory may or may not be supported by the motherboard by overclocking the memory to the manufacturers specs. And they should note that the Intel 965 chip will support DDR2 800 memory, but not all motherboard BIOS default settings will properly recognize the RAM at the 800 MHz speed. The manufacturers should include installation instructions with their memory showing how to generically change the BIOS DIMM voltage settings and end users should be aware that some motherboards without DIMM voltage adjustments in the BIOS simply aren't supported at the 800 MHz speed and that even when the DIMM voltage adjustments are available in the BIOS, compatibility issues still exist and they may be required to flash their BIOS to a newer version or, worst case, to find a new motherboard / memory combination.
I was pleased to see that the MSI, Gigabyte and Foxconn technical support were up front with me about my memory compatibility issues. It wasn't the answer I wanted to hear, but it was the right answer.
I modified the board a bit to show the Foxconn logo on the Northbridge fan correctly. I removed the four screws that hold the logo plate and fan on the Northbridge heat sink. I then rotated the fan 180° so the power cable was closer to the fan header and rotated the logo shield 90° clockwise so the logo was oriented properly. The screws holding the logo shield and fan in place don't fit into a hole, they lightly grip the heat sink ribs, so the assembly is lightly held in place. I could not do the same with the Southbridge. The logo is on the heat sink itself and the way it is secured to the motherboard does not allow it to be turned clockwise the 90° needed for the proper orientation. See View The Foxconn 975X7AB-8EKRS2H Build Page for pictures of the motherboard.
I also took the useless Power LED on the front panel of my case and zip-tied it to the drive bay to illuminate the motherboard. The yellow and green PCIe slots, USB headers and IEEE 1394 header really stand out!

• RAID 5 and Proper Boot Disc/Partition
• Degraded RAID 5, accidentally added boot drive to Rebuild
• Stupid newbie RAID 5 question
• ICH9R; RAID 5; cannot re-add drive to volume
• Raid 5 Issues
• A RAID that just works - no matter what
• Motherboard with RAID 5?
• Need to resize a RAID 5 config. Anyone successful with this?
• Recommendations on Raid Controller
• Motherboard that supports booting from larger than 2.0TB raid...
• RAID with minimal (but really big) hard drives
• How 2 configure ASUS P6T w/lone SSD + SATA RAID?
• P7P55D EVO Raid
• Can you have a single volume larger than 2TB?

RAID Type	Drives Needed (min)	Strategy	Advantages	Disadvantages	Implementation
0	2	Speed, Maximize Storage Space	Allows data to be stored and accessed orstriped acrosstwo drives. Faster read and write speeds.	Your risk of data loss is essentially double that of a single drive implementation and, like a single drive implementation, there is no data backup. Data loss occurs when a drive fails. With two drives, that risk increases nearly times two.	Store data on a striped drive that you want fast access speeds (the OS is a perfect example of this). Any programs or data that can be easily reloaded, downloaded, replaced, retrieved or restored is a good candidate for a striped volume. You can also consider any data that is easily recreated or you don't mind it if you lose it.
1	2	Speed For Reads, Data Safety	Allows data to be duplicated ormirrored acrosstwo drives. Both drives appear to be one large drive to your system. Read speeds are faster.	Essentially reduces your effective volume size to 1/2. Since your data is stored physically twice, a 500 MB has only 250 MB of effective storage. You get some performance increase for reading files only.	If a drive fails, you can be up and running in a very short time. Since all data is duplicated, in theory, nothing should be lost.
10	4	Speed and Data Safety	Provides good performance and data safety.	Requires four drives, too expensive for most desktop users. It may be overkill for most users. Not all motherboards will support four drives, IDE or SATA, though you should go with SATA if possible.	All essential data that you don't want to lose should go here. Examples would be any home movies or pictures, emails, IM chats you want to keep, personal spreadsheets, text files, Word documents and personal databases are all candidates for a mirrored volume.
Intel Matrix	2	Speed, Maximize Storage Space and Data Safety	Allows data to be accessed orstriped acrosstwo drives and duplicated ormirrored acrossthe same two drives.	The effective storage size for the RAID 1 volume is 1/2 the space remaining to be allocated. Example: You have 233.4 GB x 2 to allocate (466.8 GB total). You set up volume 0 as striped with 300 GB allocated. That leaves 166.8 GB to allocate. Volume 1 is set up as mirrored with 166.8 GB allocated with an effective storage size of 83.4 GB (166.8 divided by two).	The best of both worlds. You can implement RAID 0 and RAID 1 with only two drives. All non-essential data that you don't mind losing should go on the striped volume. All essential data that you don't want to lose should go on the mirrored volume.

How Turbo Mode Works

Source

AMD and Intel both figured out the practical maximum power consumption of a desktop CPU. Intel actually discovered it first, through trial and error, in the Prescott days. At the high end that's around 130W, for the upper mainstream market that's 95W. That's why all high end CPUs ship with 120 - 140W TDPs.

Regardless of whether you have one, two, four, six or eight cores - the entire chip has to fit within that power envelope. A single core 95W chip gets to have a one core eating up all of that power budget. This is where we get very high clock speed single core CPUs from. A 95W dual core processor means that individually the cores have to use less than the single 95W processor, so tradeoffs are made: each core runs at a lower clock speed. A 95W quad core processor requires that each core uses less power than both a single or dual core 95W processor, resulting in more tradeoffs. Each core runs at a lower clock speed than the 95W dual core processor.

The diagram below helps illustrate this:

	Single Core	Dual Core	Quad Core	Hex Core
TDP
Tradeoff

The TDP is constant, you can't ramp power indefinitely - you eventually run into cooling and thermal density issues. The variables are core count and clock speed (at least today), if you increase one, you have to decrease the other.

Here's the problem: what happens if you're not using all four cores of the 95W quad core processor? You're only consuming a fraction of the 95W TDP because parts of the chip are idle, but your chip ends up being slower than a 95W dual core processor since its clocked lower. The consumer has to thus choose if they should buy a faster dual core or a slower quad core processor.

A smart processor would realize that its cores aren't frequency limited, just TDP limited. Furthermore, if half the chip is idle then the active cores could theoretically run faster.

That smart processor is Lynnfield.

Intel made a very important announcement when Nehalem launched last year. Everyone focused on cache sizes, performance or memory latency, but the most important part of Nehalem was far more subtle: the Power Gate Transistor.

Transistors are supposed to act as light switches - allowing current to flow when they're on, and stopping the flow when they're off. One side effect of constantly reducing transistor feature size and increasing performance is that current continues to flow even when the transistor is switched off. It's called leakage current, and when you've got a few hundred million transistors that are supposed to be off but are still using current, power efficiency suffers. You can reduce leakage current, but you also impact performance when doing so; the processes with the lowest leakage, can't scale as high in clock speed.

Using some clever materials engineering Intel developed a very low resistance, low leakage, transistor that can effectively drop any circuits behind it to near-zero power consumption; a true off switch. This is the Power Gate Transistor.

On a quad-core Phenom II, if two cores are idle, blocks of transistors are placed in the off-state but they still consume power thanks to leakage current. On any Nehalem processor, if two cores are idle, the Power Gate transistors that feed the cores their supply current are turned off and thus the two cores are almost completely turned off - with extremely low leakage current. This is why nothing can touch Nehalem's idle power:

Since Nehalem can effectively turn off idle cores, it can free up some of that precious TDP we were talking about above. The next step then makes perfect sense. After turning off idle cores, let's boost the speed of active cores until we hit our TDP limit.

On every single Nehalem (Lynnfield included) lies around 1 million transistors (about the complexity of a 486) whose sole task is managing power. It turns cores off, underclocks them and is generally charged with the task of making sure that power usage is kept to a minimum. Lynnfield's PCU (Power Control Unit) is largely the same as what was in Bloomfield. The architecture remains the same, although it has a higher sampling rate for monitoring the state of all of the cores and demands on them.

The PCU is responsible for turbo mode.

AMD Thuban X6 vs. Intel icore i7

Source

Intel Core

This article is about the Intel processor brand name. For the Intel microarchitecture that is the basis for the Core 2 processor family, see Core (microarchitecture)
Intel Core is a brand name used for various mid-range to high-end consumer and business microprocessors.

In general, processors sold as Core are more powerful variants of the same processors marketed as entry-level Celeron and Pentium. Similarly, identical or more capable versions of Core processors are also sold as Xeon processors for the server market.
The current lineup of Core processors includes the latest Intel Core i7, Intel Core i5 and Intel Core i3, and the older Intel Core 2 Solo, Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel Core 2 Quad and Intel Core 2 Extreme lines.^[1]

Contents 1 Overview 2 Enhanced Pentium M based 2.1 Core Duo 2.2 Core Solo 3 64-bit Core microarchitecture based 3.1 Core 2 Solo 3.2 Core 2 Duo 3.3 Core 2 Quad 3.4 Core 2 Extreme 4 Nehalem microarchitecture based 4.1 Core i3 4.2 Core i5 4.3 Core i7 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

Intel Core processor family

Brand	Desktop				Laptop
	Code-named	Cores	Fab	Date released	Code-named	Cores	Fab	Date released
Core Solo	Desktop version not available				Yonah	1	65 nm	Jan 2006
Core Duo	Desktop version not available				Yonah	2	65 nm	Jan 2006
Core 2 Solo	Desktop version not available				Merom-L Penryn-3M	1 1	65 nm 45 nm	Sep 2007 May 2008
Core 2 Duo	Conroe Allendale Wolfdale	2 2 2	65 nm 65 nm 45 nm	Aug 2006 Jan 2007 Jan 2008	Merom Penryn	2 2	65 nm 45 nm	Jul 2006 Jan 2008
Core 2 Quad	Kentsfield Yorkfield	4 4	65 nm 45 nm	Jan 2007 Mar 2008	Penryn	4	45 nm	Aug 2008
Core 2 Extreme	Conroe XE Kentsfield XE Yorkfield XE	2 4 4	65 nm 65 nm 45 nm	Jul 2006 Nov 2006 Nov 2007	Merom XE Penryn XE Penryn XE	2 2 4	65 nm 45 nm 45 nm	Jul 2007 Jan 2008 Aug 2008
Core i3	Clarkdale	2	32 nm	Jan 2010	Arrandale	2	32 nm	Jan 2010
Core i5	Lynnfield Clarkdale	4 2	45 nm 32 nm	Sep 2009 Jan 2010	Arrandale	2	32 nm	Jan 2010
Core i7	Bloomfield Lynnfield Gulftown	4 4 6	45 nm 45 nm 32 nm	Nov 2008 Sep 2009 Jul 2010	Clarksfield Arrandale	4 2	45 nm 32 nm	Sep 2009 Jan 2010
Core i7 Extreme Edition	Bloomfield Gulftown	4 6	45 nm 32 nm	Nov 2008 March 2010	Clarksfield	4	45 nm	Sep 2009
List of Intel Core microprocessors List of Intel Core 2 microprocessors List of Intel Core i3 microprocessors List of Intel Core i5 microprocessors List of Intel Core i7 microprocessors List of future Intel microprocessors

AMD Divulges Phenom II X6 Secrets,

Turbo Core Enabled

Last month Intel introduced its first desktop 6-core CPU, the 32nm Gulftown Core i7 980X. Running at 3.33GHz we loved the fact that it’s quite possibly the first Extreme Edition part that is able to justify its price. For $999 you get six cores and better performance all in the same power envelope as the current high end quad-core i7s.

The 980X is a great chip, but spending $999 on a single component in your PC is a tough sell for most folks. Luckily, AMD is coming out with its own 6-core processors codenamed Thuban. Below is what we know so far about AMD's Thuban lineup (note, the information in the table was not provided by AMD):

AMD 2010 Roadmap
CPU	Clock Speed	Max Turbo (<= 3 cores)	L3 Cache	TDP	Release
Phenom II X6 1090T	3.2GHz	3.6GHz	6MB	125W	Q2
Phenom II X6 1075T	3.0GHz	3.5GHz	6MB	125W	Q3
Phenom II X6 1055T	2.8GHz	3.3GHz	6MB	125W/95W	Q2
Phenom II X6 1035T	2.6GHz	3.1GHz	6MB	95W	Q2
Phenom II X4 960T	3.0GHz	3.4GHz	6MB	95W	Q2

Officially branded the Phenom II X6, AMD won’t be launching these processors until some time in the future. But today AMD is disclosing some basic details about the parts. We’re also mixing in our knowledge of internal AMD roadmaps to paint a clear picture of AMD’s 6-core strategy.

The more cores at the same TDP feature that Intel delivers with the 980X, AMD is also promising with Phenom II X6. The difference is that these are still 45nm parts. While we’ll have to test them to be sure, AMD currently indicates that the entire Phenom II X6 lineup will be rated at 95W or 125W TDPs. It’s all manufacturing tricks that make it possible (good job GlobalFoundries). In theory you should be able to buy a Phenom II X6 and have it operate in the same power envelope as a Phenom II X4 965.

With the Thuban cores AMD is introducing its version of Intel’s Turbo Boost technology called Turbo Core. AMD has yet to implement power gating on its processors, so Turbo Core works a little differently than Intel’s Turbo.

Turbo Core kicks in when 3 or more cores (on a 6-core part) are idle. When this happens, the frequency of those three cores is reduced to 800MHz, the voltage to the entire chip is increased, and the remaining three cores are turboed up by as much as 500MHz. It doesn’t get any more granular than this. If you have 3 or more cores idle, then the remaining turbo up. In any other situation the CPU runs at its normal clocks.

The CPU handles all monitoring and does the clock/voltage management itself. The switch to turbo up cores apparently happens fast enough to deal with Windows moving threads around from core to core.

Turbo core is triggered by a deterministic system that is based on load demand and current operating conditions (not temperature).

Cool’n’Quiet is active throughout the turbo process. What actually happens is that when CnQ looks to see if a set of cores should be downclocked, it also has the ability to increase the frequency of other cores.

This isn’t nearly as elegant of a solution as Intel’s turbo. The idle cores are never actually shut off, and voltage to all cores is increased to reach the higher clock speed. However if it works as advertised with no drawbacks (e.g. underclocking 3 cores when you actually still need them) then it’s definitely better than nothing for the Phenom II lineup. AMD will also have quad-core CPUs with turbo core support based on the new Thuban cores.

The great news? All Socket-AM3 and AM2+ motherboards will work with these new Phenom II X6 CPUs with nothing more than a BIOS update. The boards do have to support the TDPs the chips are rated for of course.

i core i5-750

SPECIFICATIONS

Essentials
Status	Launched
Launch Date	Q3'09
Processor Number	i5-750
# of Cores	4
# of Threads	4
Clock Speed	2.66 GHz
Max Turbo Frequency	3.2 GHz
Intel® Smart Cache	8 MB
Bus/Core Ratio	20
DMI	2.5 GT/s
Instruction Set	64-bit
Instruction Set Extensions	SSE4.2
Embedded Options Available	Yes
Supplemental SKU	No
Lithography	45 nm
Max TDP	95 W
VID Voltage Range	0.6500V-1.4000V
1ku Bulk Budgetary Price	$196.00

Memory Specifications
Max Memory Size (dependent on memory type)	16 GB
Memory Types	DDR3-1066/1333
# of Memory Channels	2
Max Memory Bandwidth	21 GB/s
Physical Address Extensions	36-bit

Graphics Specifications
Integrated Graphics	No

Expansion Options
PCI Express Revision	2.0
PCI Express Configurations	1x16, 2x8
# of PCI Express Ports	1

Package Specifications
Max CPU Configuration	1
TCASE	72.7°C
Package Size	37.5mm x 37.5mm
Processing Die Size	296 mm2
# of Processing Die Transistors	774 million
Sockets Supported	LGA1156
Halogen Free Options Available	Yes

Advanced Technologies
Intel® Turbo Boost Technology	Yes
Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology	No
Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT-x)	Yes
Intel® Trusted Execution Technology	No
AES New Instructions	No
Intel® 64	Yes
Idle States	Yes
Enhanced Intel SpeedStep® Technology	Yes
Intel® Demand Based Switching	No
Thermal Monitoring Technologies	No
Execute Disable Bit	Yes

Intel Core i3 and i5-750/s will not have VT-d technology

Intel launched its new consumer processors based on the 45nm Nehalem architecture that we already saw in the new enterprise-class CPUs Xeon 5500 

This new architecture includes two critical extensions to improve the performance of virtualization platforms: VT-x (nested page tables) and VT-d (I/O virtualization).

The latter may be especially important to grant superior performance in a VDI environment powered by client hypervisors, but Intel is not offering VT-d on all its new CPUs.

The new Nehalem-based processors will be dubbed Core i3, i5 and i7 in place of the well known brand name Core 2. The first ones, that may arrive as soon as early September, will feature the VT-x but not VT-d extension.

Yesterday HKEPC reported that the Core i5 750 and the the entire Core i3 product line (expected for Q1 2010) will not include VT-d: