Why is only one of the processors showing up when I view Task Manager's Performance tab? When running in BootCamp it does display two cpu's but not when running Parallel. BTW great job so far, with Beta 4, I can now assign more than 156 MB of memory to Windows (now has 512 which make it run so much faster). The sound is now smooth and it no longer complains when I start it with no CD in the drive. Still has some issues with launching on occasion but I suspect that a re-install will take care of that problem.
Will Parallels support SMP ? Why do you virtualize only 1 cpu ? is it a hardware problem or something else ?
I can clearly see that PW uses BOTH cores of Core Duo with full extent on the application level, so I'm guessing that the guest OS is enjoying the processing power of both cores as single core. I wonder if this is the case?
i dont think its a case of parallels not using both physical cpus of the HOST os. the VM itself doesnt present 2 virtual cpu's to the GUEST os. to my knowledge the current versions of VMWare Workstation and Server are the only virtualization environments that support a virtualized SMP/Mulitproc feature and they regard it as experimental. SMP in a vm is an unusual feature as most applications dont *require* multiprocs to be present. VMWare, even though they support the feature, discourages people from using it as it will generally effect performance in a negative way. likely as the VM is now virtualizing 2 cpus instead of just 1. the virtual cpu you see in a GUEST os is just a placeholder representation. its not a real cpu, nor is it necessarily limited to the number of physical cpus...you could run 4 simultaneous VM's that each have virtual cpus...its not like you have 4 real cpus; those 4 virtual cpus are sharing whatever underlying cpu(s) exist on the HOST os. parallels and the HOST os are going to manage how all the different tasks are spread across whatever underlying physical hardware is present on the HOST hardware. at the end of the day, you are only going to get as much processing power out of your hardware as it can support. the less overhead you put on the VM environment, the more potential performance you can get. -- in the bootcamp configuration the OS is directly attached to the underlying hardware with no virtualization layer so you see whatever cpu hardware is present. boogie
