The "lowest" end of the CPUs that the OP discusses are low end desktop/laptop parts. Furthermore, the biggest criticism of the author isn't the feature disablin

The "lowest" end of the CPUs that the OP discusses are low end desktop/laptop parts. Furthermore, the biggest criticism of the author isn't the feature disabling per se, but how inconsistently Intel applies it across their overall performance bins. For example, the lack of TXT support in high end i7 parts when its there for middle tier i5 parts. Why the i7-3990K has VT-d and the i7-3770K doesnt(which really should just be distinguished by their clock/cache/TDP).