Searching the web brings up quite a few answers to this question, but many of them are contradictory to one another, and I am hoping that someone from Intel can shed some REAL light on the question:
Put simply, if I am building a physical machine (workstation or server) and do not intend to use any manner of virtualization in the environment, should the VT-x extensions be enabled in the BIOS or not? More importantly -- explain your answer!
I understand that the extensions are needed if you will ever do a VM -- this makes sense. But is there a cost to enabling the extensions? Does any part of the CPU run more slowly? Less securely? Many posts on the general web say that it doesn't matter -- but if it really didn't matter, why would hardware/bios vendors expend time and effort to even make it an option?