There has been talk about the new XP Mode in Windows 7 Ultimate and Professional versions, but something that I found to be interesting was a complaint that came up about it this morning.

It seems the guys over at Engadget were upset that running a live virtualization layer with full hardware support would require actual hardware virtualization support.

I know this is a shocker to me too; they do at least go on to say that almost all AMD CPUs since the Althon64 have this but state that not all Intel CPUs do, namely the Pentium, and Atom.

Here is the rub, Ultimate and Pro editions of 7 are more than likely not going to be dropped onto low end hardware like the Pentium or Atom.
It is pretty easy to find out if your current CPU supports this by a quick visit to Intel or AMD's website. If you have it and are planning for Windows 7 Ultimate or Pro great, you are all set. If not well you need an upgrade if you want to use this feature.

Read more here

Microsoft tickled our meta-OS fancies last week by talking up the virtualized version of Windows XP included with Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate Edition. However, the company has now revealed that ponying up for one of the top tiers of the OS will not be the only requirement. 2GB of RAM will be needed, which isn't such a big deal, but more troubling is the requirement of a CPU that sports chip-level virtualization support. Both AMD and Intel have been quick to add features to support enterprises turning to virtualized hosting environments, but rather annoyingly neither of those companies make it particularly easy to tell which of their chips provide such support.