what would be the actual cpu speed in virtualbox (intel-atom 1.6ghz)

what is the actual cpu speed of virtualbox on a intel-atom 1.6ghz
how would we compare the speed of virtualbox to our host cpu which does not have virtualization?

virtualization: the feature of a cpu that allows multiple OS to boot at the same time with little slow down.

if there was a tool which tests the actual cpu speed of the OS in virtualbox rather than incorrectly reading the speed of the host OS, please let me know.

I don't know about VirtualBox - but here's Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 running XPMode on a Packard Bell dot se Intel Atom N450, Host speed 1.66GHz >>>>1.57GHz on the XPMode guest

my new netbook - Fxxxing Computers!

Hi there
Measuring the "Real" cpu consumption of a Virtual Machine is NOT a trivial exercise -- in fact it would be horrendously difficult to get an ACCURATE measure even assuming its possible.

However in general the most critical resource for a Virtual Machine is not normally a lack of available CPU power -- I often run Virtual Machines quite satisfactorily (one at a time) on a small ACER apire one NETBOOK -- but a lack of REAL RAM -- Virtual Machines eat RAM for breakfast. I did add 1GB to the netbook giving 2GB RAM allowing me to reasonably run an XP or a W7 VM.

I'm not trying to discourage the OP from trying to get the answer -- but if you are worried about resources needed to run a Virtual Machine -- the overhead isn't huge provided the Virtual Machines aren't running complex CPU bound tasks like calculations on very large spreadsheets etc and you don't have too many Virtual Machines active at the same time.

RAM is the main requirement and LOTS OF IT.

However what you CAN do is to compare benchmarks of standard tests running on a Host machine (or one without any VM running) with the same tasks performed in a Virtual Machine.

This will give say an indication that performance on a VM is for example 85% of Native mode.

BUT you CANNOT then infer from this that if the Native benchmark tests use 35% of the CPU the Virtual machine is using significantly more or less than this.

Cheers
jimbo