I have a 13" sub-laptop/large-netbook, it has an AMD Athlon Neo X2 L335, and I chose this one because it supports hardware virtualisation.

In the end, I hardly do any virtualisation on it, however, when I do... it is fast.

To my shock, I went in to the BIOS and saw that virtualisation was disabled!

I turned this on and, I see no speed difference.... or at least none that I can tell.

I do not have time to do a full set of benchmarks - and I run quite a bit of software on the host, so it wouldn't be scientific. I have searched quite a few places and I just can not find any benchmarks showing the difference of virtualisation bit enabled/disabled on the same hardware. Does anyone have any benchmarks they have seen that they can share?

In addition, I know there was an uproar a while ago as Sony disable the hardware virtualisation on some models and only offer it in their higher models as a premium feature, however, apart from forcing an up-sell, are there any benefits to having it disabled e.g. battery/heat? I just can't find any information and can't work out why it would be disabled by default.

Edit---

To add, The only thing I can find is that without it, you can not perform x64 virtualisation as fast. This is the only down side I can find. However, if this is the only difference, then I am still interested in the second part of the question - why offer the option to disable it?