Legit Reviews

Hello, all!

First some background on the situation:
So, I'm going to be buying a new laptop soon, and one of my priorities is to do Windows Phone and Android app development on it. I don't play games, etc. so a high-end graphic chip is not my requirement. I need to run CPU-intensive simulation software like MATLAB occasionally so I need a good processor.

Considering my budget and requirement and availability in my country; I've narrowed it down to two machines. An HP ProBook (which has an i7-3632QM processor + 8GB RAM), and an HP Pavilion (which has an i7-4702MQ + 4GB RAM).

Now for the problem. Since I'll be doing app development, a good testing procedure is to test it on an emulator, for phone WP8 and Android... To run the emulators smoothly it is required that the processor support Intel Virtualization, and SLAT. Both processors do have Virtualization, but there is something called VT-d which is there for the Ivy Bridge but not the Haswell chip.

My questions are:
1. Do I need VT-d for proper emulation of devices, or is VT-x sufficient?
2. Should I prefer the 8GB RAM over the other, would it make too much of a difference in emulation and development?

You don't need VT-d, but it can provide for a more stable and better performing setup; think heavily loaded esx servers running multiple vm's

VT-d allows the vm to have direct i/o access (if you want it to, or no access) (i/o = hdd, lan, snd card, usb, GFX etc)

The hypervisor can and does do this in software for older cpu's

If you're running a single vm and it's emulating a smart phone, then don't worry about it.

kenc51 wrote:You don't need VT-d, but it can provide for a more stable and better performing setup; think heavily loaded esx servers running multiple vm's

VT-d allows the vm to have direct i/o access (if you want it to, or no access) (i/o = hdd, lan, snd card, usb, GFX etc)

The hypervisor can and does do this in software for older cpu's

If you're running a single vm and it's emulating a smart phone, then don't worry about it.

Wow, thanks for the explanation! Appreciate it.