amd-v xen

I'm looking to virtualize some services with xen and since I'm buying new hardware I'm curious about the amd-v chip.

I glanced over an AMD paper on xen on the amd-v chip. I also found a blog post which discusses these types of chips and the my hypervisor uses cpu hardware extensions to do what you do in software so it's faster than yours debate. The first benefit you'll hear about from AMD-V seems to be allowing unmodified guests to run on xen. I.e. the OS that you want to host doesn't need to be ported to xen. Since I'm mainly looking at running Linux I'm not too excited. The paper also claims it "reduces overhead by selectively intercepting instructions destined for guest environments". This seems plausible, though I'm curious if it's just newspeak.

AMD also claims that the memory controller "provides efficient isolation of virtual machine memory". This seems to be the most relevant benefit for me. I don't know enough about memory controllers to fully appreciate this. So far I'm hearing about memory virtualization (i.e. AMD Nested Page Tables and Intel Extended Page Tables) but virtal memory is nothing new. The difference seems to be a focus on isolating memory for a virtual machine as noted by the inquirer and project-xen.web.