More CPUs and RAM available than my Mac actually has?

Hi gang,

I recently got a MacBook Pro Retina, with 8Gig memory and 4 processors (or rather "Cores", as it says in the about this mac dialogs).

When I edit the configuration for my virtual machines, the memory slider goes up to 16GB, and the number of processors I can assign to my VM is up to 8.

Does this make sense to anyone? It didn't happen on my old Mac, with the same hardware config.

The "recommended" area for memory is still 512MB - 4GB, so I'm staying at 4. (I do a lot of development work in a Windows VM, so I need it to be optimal.) But is there any reason I might not want to take the number of processors up to 6 or something? (I guess I'll have to try it out.)

Basically, I'm wondering if my sweet new machine and the latest parallels are able to provide the experience of more processors and/or RAM to my virtual machine than I actually have, in some way. (For instance, perhaps some of the SSD memory can be used effectively as RAM? Wouldn't think it would be fast enough, even as SSD...)

Thanks for any insight. Just finding this puzzling.
-Apollo

 

With 16GB of RAM and 64-bit Windows Pro 8.1, why not increase the number of processors dedicated to your VM (virtual machine) to 4?
That little 'tweak' will leave the other 4 processors to handle OSX Mavericks (and, by extension...Parallels 9.0)....plus, 12GB of RAM as well (after deducting the standard max 4GB for the VM).
Running a 32-bit VM w Windows Pro 8.1 32-bit AND a 64-bit VM w Windows Pro 8.1 64-bit is a little taxing I have found by experience.
But, as long as you do not run the two VM's concurrently (w the 32-bit VM at 3GB of RAM, and 4 processors, as well), then max performance can be in sight.
~ Robert