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What's the best way to run Windows on Mac OS X?: CNET runs some benchmarks

crave.cnet.com — CNET Labs ran some benchmarks comparing different ways to run Windows on an Intel Mac, including Boot Camp, VMware Fusion, and Parallels Desktop 3.0 , using multimedia, Photoshop, Cinebench R10, and Quake 4. Tests were run on a Mac Pro with 2 x 2.66 GHz Xeon chips (8 cores) with 2 GB of RAM. Lots of pretty graphs and commentary.

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  • petekazanjy, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0Interesting to see how multiple CPU cores really helps with certain workloads.
  • streak, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Apple doesn't sell a Mac Pro with 8 cores at 2.66 GHz. The 8-core system is 3.0 GHz. All others are 4-core.
  • keithmcbride, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1this test seemed good, but as it went on it became obvious that it was worthless. if parallels is using one core, and vmware gets 8, why is parallels expected to keep up?

    even a test on a multicore macbook would have been more fair, as those only have 2 cores.
    • geoken, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2On the flipside, why should VMWare's advantage of using multiple cores be ignored considering every currently shipping Mac comes with at least 2 cores?
    • petekazanjy, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0@Anothergene: VMware Fusion lets you assign up to two virtual processors per VM. So, really, you could have multiple dual-core VMs operating, if you wanted. I.e., on an eight-core Mac Pro, you could have a dual core Windows XP VM, a dual core Windows Vista VM, and a dual core Linux VM, if you wanted. Each VM would be limited to two virtual cores, but VMware Fusion would not be limited to only 2 cores.

      We've seen people setting up application stacks just like that, with a web server on a dual-core VM, a database on a dual core VM, and an application server on a dual core VM, all linked together, using the Mac Pro hardware.

      So to be accurate, while you can only use 2 virtual cores PER VM, but you can utilize more than 2 of your physical cores with Fusion--just in multiple VMs.
  • petekazanjy, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0@Keith: If you want to make use of your Mac hardware, it seems really important that your virtualization software would utilize more than one core in a VM. Otherwise, what's the point of snazzy hardware?

    And a quick correction: VMware Fusion can utilize up to two cores in a VM, not eight. So in this case, VMware Fusion got two cores, while Parallels got one.

    However, if you look at some of the tests, VMware Fusion produced 4x the performance, on double the cores.
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