He probably means VT-d since he mentioned passthrough. VT-x is just the virtualization extensions needed for many hypervisors, while VT-d lets your VMs directly

He probably means VT-d since he mentioned passthrough. VT-x is just the virtualization extensions needed for many hypervisors, while VT-d lets your VMs directly access the actual physical hardware. Like dedicating a physical GPU or NIC to a VM. I'm not sure which modern CPUs and motherboards support that. I know back in the Core2 days when VT-d was first introduced, it was a nightmare to find the right combination. Looking from the outside, Intel also seems to play a lot of marketing games with their CPU features. Sometimes top-of-the-line CPUs will be missing features that others have. Like selling a $6K Xeon CPU manufactured this quarter without virtualization support. (http://ark.intel.com/products/95831/Intel-Xeon-Phi-Processor-7290F-16GB-1_50-GHz-72-core http://ark.intel.com/products/95831/Intel-Xeon-Phi-Processor...) Supposedly they want to get that feature in there at a later date, but that's not something we like to trust in with computer components. Your VT-x search returns 1459 products, while the VT-d search returned only 788. Here's a list of things that say they support VT-x but not VT-d (http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?s=t&VTX=true&VTD=false http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?s=t&VTX=true&VTD=false). Pretty sure some entries on it are wrong, but Intel is also terrible about keeping old technology names on newer spec sheets. Maybe they folded VT-d into VT-x without telling the world?