Intel recently announced the details of the company's forthcoming family of processors, codenamed Penryn, which is slated for release in the second half of this year. These new processors benefit from enhancements to the Intel Core microarchitecture and also Intel's industry-leading 45nm Hi-k process technology with its hafnium-based high-K + metal gate transistor design, which results in higher performance and Intel recently announced the details of the company’s forthcoming family of processors, codenamed Penryn, which is slated for release in the second half of this year.These new processors benefit from enhancements to the Intel Core microarchitecture and also Intel’s industry-leading 45nm Hi-k process technology with its hafnium-based high-K + metal gate transistor design, which results in higher performance and more energy-efficient processors.One of the major features of the Penryn processor line is its enhanced Intel Virtualization Technology (VT). Specifically, Penryn speeds up virtual machine transition entry and exit times by an average of 25 to 75 percent. And according to Intel, this is all done through microarchitecture improvements and requires no virtual machine software changes. There are a lot of discussions going around right now about virtual machine performance differences from one virtualization platform to another. Products such as Parallels or those built on Xen technology will be the biggest winners with Intel’s performance increase as they are all designed to take advantage of Intel’s VT. VMware on the other hand leverages their own tuned binary translation monitor for 32-bit guest operating systems, which they claim currently outperforms the hardware assisted VT technology in many cases. It will be interesting to see what the performance differences are between these products once Intel’s latest Penryn line hits the streets and virtualization platforms take advantage of the new VT code. Software Development