Changing vga=normal on the boot options lets us see this message (see attached):
Total of 2 processors activated (11178.27 BogoMIPS)
ENABLING IO-APIC IRQs
..Timer: vector=0x31 apic1=0 pin1=2 apic2=-1 pin2=-1
Adding acpi=off to the grub command line gets it to boot OK, but hyperthreading is disabled. Manually disabling hyperthreading in the BIOS results in the same error.
Let us know if we can provide any more information.