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.
Aug 16, 2007 View in Crawl 4
petekazanjyAug 16, 2007Submitter
Interesting to see how multiple CPU cores really helps with certain workloads.
keithmcbrideAug 17, 2007
this 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.
geokenAug 17, 2007
On the flipside, why should VMWare's advantage of using multiple cores be ignored considering every currently shipping Mac comes with at least 2 cores?
petekazanjyAug 24, 2007Submitter
@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.