Virtualisation Support
Virtualisation software allows a single computer to run multiple operating systems ( or Virtual Machines [VM] ). Intel's Virtualisation Technology (VT) and AMD's AMD-V provide processor extensions to support virtualisation. This makes the VMs run much more quickly. These extensions are usually features of premium models in a given processor range.
There is also a second generation of virtualisation extensions to support Second Level Address Translation (SLAT), a feature of virtualisation software designed to improve the management of virtual (paged) memory. These extensions are referred to as Extended Page Table (EPT) by Intel and Rapid Virtualisation Indexing (RVI) by AMD.
Power management and Virtualisation are covered in the 802 Support Skills course.
Malware Protection
Computer viruses (and other malware) can use carious techniques to infect a computer. One is a so-called buffer overflow attack, where the virus "tricks" another program into executing it when the other program thinks it is just processing some data.
CPUs and operating systems supporting AMD's No Execute (NX) technology are more resilient against this type of attack because they prevent areas in memory marked for data storage from executing code (running a new program). Intel call this feature Execute Disable (XD); in Windows, it is referred to as Data Execution Prevention (DEP).
Integrated GPU
Initially, an integrated GPU would be implemented as a chip on the motherboard; Intel's Graphics Media Accelerator for instance. Nowadays, it is more likely that an integrated GPU (or Integrated Graphics Processor [IGP]) will be part of the CPU (Intel HD Graphics of example).