Hi Andrew, I think this is on topic since we’re talking about the use of a set
of applications on the Mac, Mark or Kara can speak up if not but I think we’re
well with in safe territory for the subject and it’s a great question.
Threading is just a fancy computer word for scheduling. Threads are processes
that run on physical hardware and you can assign threads or schedules to
applications to get work done.
Each physical core is a processing engine. Back in the ancient days
say the early 2000s and before:) a processor only had one processing engine on
the dye. A dye is the physical piece of silicon that the processor is etched
on. Etching is a chemical process where they cut the components on to a piece
of silicon similar to say glass etchings but in extraordinarily fine detail.
With better chemistry and processes it became possible to put more than one
physical processor on the same piece of silicon or dye. They started with 2
cores, then 4 and I believe they are up to 12 or more now on a single piece of
silicon for high end applications. The intel chips we use in our laptops
support 2 or 4 cores or 2 or 4 processors per single dye. This means in the
place where you used to be able to put one processor in a single socket you can
put 4 or more now.
Each physical core has 2 threads also called Hyper Threading. This
means to your software, if you look at the number of processors installed on a
MacBook Pro 13 inch you’ll see 4 physical processors but in reality you have a
single chip or dye with 2 physical processors and each processor is broken in
to 2 pieces. So you can see how we get to a point where there’s twice as many
cores showing up in software as there actually are on the dye.
Now when you run VMWare or other virtualization software you have the
ability to assign cores to a virtual machine. Each core is one of these hyper
threaded segments so you get 2 cores per actual core or in your case a maximum
of 4. On the 15 inch models, they use 4 core processors so you can have up to
8 cores on a VM.
How do the number of cores relate to getting work done? So core count
is more important than clock speed or anything else. For example, a 4 core I5
version of the processor will out perform a 2 core or dual core version of the
I7. The reason is you have two more actual engines doing work so on an I5 even
though each individual engine is less powerful the aggregate of all 4 out
performs 2 I7 cores. As you’d expect, 4 I7 cores will out perform 4 I5 cores
so you can start to see a relationship here.
On your virtual machines you assign cores based on how much work you
want to do with each machine. In my case I run a lot of virtual routers which
for my purposes of learning and lab testing don’t need a huge amount of horse
power each so I will assign 1 per or at most 2. On the other hand, Windows
requires more effort to run so I might assign half my cores or 4 out of 8 to
the virtual machine leaving a good amount of power left over for my Mac and a
good amount for the VM. It’s not exactly a linear calculation but it’s good
enough for government work so you can split things up that way. The more cores
you assign to the VM the fewer are available for scheduling other Mac Jobs.
You can assign all 8 and the load will just be shared with the Mac, it doesn’t
render the mac side useless but your VM can really pull a lot of power from the
rest of the machine in that configuration.
Let me know if this has helped you or if I’ve only confused you worse. Feel
free to ask any followup questions to help fill in the gaps or anything I’ve
confused you on.
Thanks for the great question.
Scott
> On Oct 25, 2016, at 4:22 AM, Andrew Lamanche <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> can I just ask a quick somewhat off-topic question regarding the cores
> assigned to the virtual machine? I have a macbook pro 13 inch 2014 with 16GB
> RAM and I7 processor. Does this mean I could assign easily 4 cores to
> Windows in VMWare Fusion?
>
> I've always had a bit of trouble understanding the subject of cores and
> virtual cores and threading for that matter. :)
>
> Many thanks
>
> Andrew
>> On 25 Oct 2016, at 00:30, Scott Granados <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Hi there, one thing you can do is make sure you have enough cores dedicated.
>> On a 13 inch MacBook pro I’d probably go 4 GB for the VM and at least 2
>> cores for the CPU. Remember it’s 2 cores in software per every real core do
>> to hyper threading. If you have the I5 processor then you have 2 cores so
>> you could bump up to 4 but it will impact the Mac side. It’s a nice little
>> power house though so you should be fine. Also wait a minute after windows
>> boots as the boot process is a real drain on resources.
>>
>> As for voice over, you can use the VM with VO engaged but I find it works
>> better with VO off and just activate it when you need it.
>>
>> Good luck.
>>
>>
>>> On Oct 24, 2016, at 7:25 PM, Ramy Moustafa <[email protected]>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello all:
>>> I have my MacBook 2015 13 inch, the only windows app that i need is called
>>> sibelius for writing down my music notes.
>>> i installed Vmware v7.5 with windows 7 64 bitand i have only 2 issues:
>>> 1- after i start up my windows, i can not do anything until i tern off my
>>> Voice over, is it regular?
>>> 2- i gave to Vmware Fusion a very goo dram about 6 Gb, but my windows is
>>> so heavy, do i miss something inside the settings to make the windows runs
>>> smoothly while using it?
>>> note that i will not use both systems at the same time, so i need to give
>>> all my mac power to windows while using
>>> THanks
>>>
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