kuruu Posted July 12, 2007 Share Posted July 12, 2007 I've searched in earnest and can't find what i'm looking for. I am interested in *maybe* getting a quad core cpu over a fast dual core. I want to know if Parallels benefits from multiple cores. is it multithreaded? or will it use a seperate core for each app? for example, to run 2 virtual sessions and general OS functions, would load fall seperately to each core? anything links would be appreciated. thanks. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56913-does-parallels-benefit-from-quad-core/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarahbau Posted July 12, 2007 Share Posted July 12, 2007 When I tried Parallels, I was only able to get it to use one core, and I couldn't find an option for multiple cores. VMWare has the option for one or two CPUs, but I don't know if an option for 4 shows up when you have 4 cores. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56913-does-parallels-benefit-from-quad-core/#findComment-406722 Share on other sites More sharing options...
kuruu Posted July 12, 2007 Author Share Posted July 12, 2007 thanks for the reply, vmware fusions option for multiple core does not mean to use multiple cores, it means to have virtual cores running from the single core. i've searched and i really can't find anything to suggest either vmware or parallels is multithreaded. Maybe the E6750 is a better bet... I would like to know how much leopard benefits from a quad core compared to a dual core. I know for example from benchmarks i've seen that Tiger couldn't use the extra cores for {censored}. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56913-does-parallels-benefit-from-quad-core/#findComment-406889 Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarahbau Posted July 12, 2007 Share Posted July 12, 2007 thanks for the reply, vmware fusions option for multiple core does not mean to use multiple cores, it means to have virtual cores running from the single core. If that were the case, then it wouldn't require the host machine to have two logical processors (which it does). But it seems it doesn't support more than two (you can run two VMs though, each using two cores). When running a multithreaded benchmark I wrote inside a virtual machine, OS X's activity monitor shows both cores being utilized fully. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56913-does-parallels-benefit-from-quad-core/#findComment-406897 Share on other sites More sharing options...
kuruu Posted July 12, 2007 Author Share Posted July 12, 2007 i am not near an os x machine to test right now, but will definitely have to look into it more. I got my information from the vmware website, Take full advantage of 64-bit and multi-core processors of your Mac for maximum flexibility. You can run 64-bit operating systems such as Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit Edition or leverage Virtual SMP to create and run multi-processor virtual machines. Which I read to mean that Virtual SMP tricks the virtualised operating system into thinking there are two cores, but does not specifically allocate cpu resources as dictated by that guest operating system. On the other hand your tests seem to show a definite advantage in multiple cores due to multithreading. Vmware also use multithreaded opengl for rendering. I expect as leopard arrives with it's framework for multithreading a lot more applications will take advantage of more cores... Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56913-does-parallels-benefit-from-quad-core/#findComment-406909 Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarahbau Posted July 12, 2007 Share Posted July 12, 2007 Here's the CPU monitor from running my test. The first half is during the single threaded test, which shows about 50% usage per "core" (bouncing back and forth which is normal for hyperthreading). The second half shows both "cores" fully maxxed out in the multithreaded test. Edit: For a reference, my computer gets 100/100 in the single threaded test in OS X, so there is definitely a lot of overhead. Parallels actually scores better in the single threaded test, but gets lower in the multithreaded one since it doesn't use both cores. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56913-does-parallels-benefit-from-quad-core/#findComment-406910 Share on other sites More sharing options...
EtherealRemnant Posted July 13, 2007 Share Posted July 13, 2007 Yeah VMWare has always had the upper-hand on multi-core systems. Hasn't VMWare had that functionality since the first release of 5.0? EDIT: By the way, VirtualBox 1.4.0 was released - it works under OS X now and supports 64-bit though I haven't tried it yet. www.virtualbox.org Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56913-does-parallels-benefit-from-quad-core/#findComment-407109 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts