Comment by DanielHB

I remember hearing about all the support from Intel for "0-cost" virtualization at the hardware level way before I heard about containers. From what I remember it was mostly to speed up virtual machines (VMWare stuff). It was a massive market differentiator for Intel in the server space.

I vaguely remember having to turn on some features in VirtualBox at the time to speed up my VMs, it was a massive uplift in performance if you had a CPU that supported it.