MacBook Vs Pro parallels performance

rteichman · Jun 18, 2006

My G4 PowerBook hard disk died and I have decided to upgrade to a new MacBook. 50% of the time I run windows on this for work (that's why they call it work <g>) so the performance of Parallels is most important to me. I had been using Virtual PC till now and I know Parallels is much better. The question though is MacBook vs Pro.

How much difference in performance is there between the 2 machines with Parallels. In either case I would buy a 2GHz machine with 1 GB RAM.

Also is it possible to have a single Windows installation that can be accessed via BootCamp and Parallels (thus have the option of booting into Windows or just running in parallel.

Thanks

Robster · Jun 18, 2006

Which ever you get I would STRONGLY recommend you get 2Gb of memory.

I have a MacBook Pro and originally had only 1Gb of memory however I kept getting lots 'spinning beachballs' and hesitations.

Once I installed an extra 1Gb the difference in performance was significant and I would not go back to the smaller memory footprint.

Robin

joem · Jun 18, 2006

rteichman said:
How much difference in performance is there between the 2 machines with Parallels. In either case I would buy a 2GHz machine with 1 GB RAM.

As another poster said, 2GB is a better choice. You can order from Apple with 512 Meg, and upgrade to third party 2GB for less than the cost of 1GB from Apple. The Intel processor is roughly twice as fast as the PPC. (The 4x you see published is for dual core running OSX. With dual core in a MBP, you have one core for Windows and one for OSX and get excellent performance).

VPC running on the PPC processor has to interpret at the processor level, and runs five to six times slower than native code because of the software emulation, so you should see about an order of magnitude speed increase from your old machine to the new one. I chose the 1.83 GHz MBP both to save some money and because I think it will run a bit cooler. Whatever you get, be sure to get one of those little laptop cooler platforms with the built in fans. The MB and MBP are NOT designed for continuous high percentage CPU utilization and will overheat if you make long term demands on the CPU unless you supply airflow across the bottom of the machine.

Also is it possible to have a single Windows installation that can be accessed via BootCamp and Parallels (thus have the option of booting into Windows or just running in parallel.

Thanks

No.

Nor is this likely to change.

luomat · Jun 18, 2006

I have a 2.0 white MacBook with 2gb of RAM.

WinXP (512 allocated) runs better in Parallels than if I run Remote Desktop Client to another computer on my wired LAN (a 3.0Ghz hyperthreaded Pentium4 with 512mb of RAM).

VirtualPC is an utter piece of trash. Compared to Parallels you may wish you could erase the entire memory of VirtualPC from your mind.

@joem: On what do you base your statement that Parallels is not likely to support Boot Camp partitions?

http://forum.parallels.com/thread849.html indicates that the ability to boot from a Boot Camp partition IS on their road map for the future. The ability to do so would be a huge selling people for people not just for space purposes but also for the convenience of having the exact same instalaltion and the same activated version of Windows and all of their other software.

joem · Jun 18, 2006

luomat said:
VirtualPC is an utter piece of trash. Compared to Parallels you may wish you could erase the entire memory of VirtualPC from your mind.

VPC is a fine product that allows Windows to rn on a PPC Mac. It's slower than native because it has to emulate the CPU, but if you have a PPC Mac and want to run Windows, it's better than not being able to run Windows.

Parallels is faster because it doesn't have to emulate the CPU. Comparison is unfair since VPC and Parallels rn on different platforms. I've gotten lots of useful work done wth VPC.

@joem: On what do you base your statement that Parallels is not likely to support Boot Camp partitions?

http://forum.parallels.com/thread849.html indicates that the ability to boot from a Boot Camp partition IS on their road map for the future. The ability to do so would be a huge selling people for people not just for space purposes but also for the convenience of having the exact same instalaltion and the same activated version of Windows and all of their other software.

It probably won't happen soon. The Mac hardware and the emulated hardware are very different. The bootcamp installation has drivers for the hardware. The VM has drivers for the emulated hardware. Matching them for each Mac model will be a large task indeed. If they make XP run well in a VM they won't have a need for bootcamp.

I can see Parallels being able to use a real partition rather than a host OS file for a disk, but that is very different. The thread you pointed to talks about a real partition, but not a bootcamp installation.

luomat · Jun 19, 2006

joem said:
VPC is a fine product that allows Windows to rn on a PPC Mac. It's slower than native because it has to emulate the CPU, but if you have a PPC Mac and want to run Windows, it's better than not being able to run Windows.

Parallels is faster because it doesn't have to emulate the CPU. Comparison is unfair since VPC and Parallels rn on different platforms. I've gotten lots of useful work done wth VPC.

Well I'm glad someone did. I found it to be a huge disappointment.

joem said:
It probably won't happen soon. The Mac hardware and the emulated hardware are very different. The bootcamp installation has drivers for the hardware. The VM has drivers for the emulated hardware. Matching them for each Mac model will be a large task indeed. If they make XP run well in a VM they won't have a need for bootcamp.

Boot Camp will always have access to the full video driver and all of the RAM. You can't beat that in any virtualization. Even Apple won't be able to do that.

joem said:
I can see Parallels being able to use a real partition rather than a host OS file for a disk, but that is very different. The thread you pointed to talks about a real partition, but not a bootcamp installation.

I'm not clear on what the difference is, but I'll take your word for it.

rteichman · Jun 19, 2006

Thanks for all the feedback, I fully expect Parallels to be better than VPC, but on a PowerBook that was the only choice. However the main question originally was what impact would the MacBookPro's better video card have on Parallels. My decision is between a MacBook and a MacBook Pro.

joem · Jun 19, 2006

luomat said:
I'm not clear on what the difference is, but I'll take your word for it.

The difference between using a real partition and using a bootcamp installation is that using a real partition allows you to assign a physical partition as a VM hard disk, and install the guest OS there. The content of the partition will be exactly the same as the content of the .hdd file would have been if you had used that option, including drivers for the emulated (not real) hardware. The .hdd file and the physical partition would be bit for bit indentical in the two cases.

A bootcamp partition, OTOH, would have drivers, HAL, etc. for the actual Mac hardware, not the emulated hardware Parallels provides. The drivers and HAL would be incompatible with the emulated machine.

Running a bootcamp partition in a VM would require either exactly emulating the specific Mac model you were running on (nice idea and welcome if they can do it, but a HUGE task), or selectively replacing every incompatible file in the bootcamp image with one that worked with the emuated hardware, and putting the originals back on exit so you could boot bootcamp. This would probably have to be different for each Mac model since the install will select different components for installation depending on actual hardware.

Clear now?

Banacek · Jun 19, 2006

I thought they were going to use hardware profiles in XP to deal with the difference between the actual hardware and the emulated drivers...

joem · Jun 19, 2006

Banacek said:
I thought they were going to use hardware profiles in XP to deal with the difference between the actual hardware and the emulated drivers...

Someone suggested that, but I don't recall Parallels saying anything about it. I doubt it would work since there is much system stuff that isn't part of the profile that would be different. It has intuitive appeal as a theory, but it probably won't work.

Banacek · Jun 20, 2006

I figured it was a pipe dream. Oh well, I just ordered a bigger HD so I can run parallels and boot camp.

netdog · Jun 20, 2006

I don't care that they have a Linux and Windows workstation. I still think that Parallels is either going to be bought by Apple or bundled on Apples.

willwgm3 · Jun 20, 2006

joem said:
Someone suggested that, but I don't recall Parallels saying anything about it. I doubt it would work since there is much system stuff that isn't part of the profile that would be different. It has intuitive appeal as a theory, but it probably won't work.

I used to do just this with VMWare. It worked fine. It was a bit tricky setting up the different profiles, but once you do that there aren't really any problems.

celendis · Jun 20, 2006

rteichman said:
Thanks for all the feedback, I fully expect Parallels to be better than VPC, but on a PowerBook that was the only choice. However the main question originally was what impact would the MacBookPro's better video card have on Parallels. My decision is between a MacBook and a MacBook Pro.

I haven't had the opportunity to use Parallels on the integrated Intel GMA graphics. However, since Parallels has no (hardware) 3d support, the effect on using Parallels would be insignificant (or less) between the two graphics platforms.

That said, if you use Boot Camp, there will be a difference, but only in applications that require 3D processing.

MicroDev · Jun 23, 2006

rteichman said:
My G4 PowerBook hard disk died and I have decided to upgrade to a new MacBook. 50% of the time I run windows on this for work (that's why they call it work <g>) so the performance of Parallels is most important to me. I had been using Virtual PC till now and I know Parallels is much better. The question though is MacBook vs Pro.

How much difference in performance is there between the 2 machines with Parallels. In either case I would buy a 2GHz machine with 1 GB RAM.

Also is it possible to have a single Windows installation that can be accessed via BootCamp and Parallels (thus have the option of booting into Windows or just running in parallel.

Thanks

With 512MB allocated to XP, Mail and Safari running, I am consuming 1,650MB of RAM. I'd recommend that you get 2GB too.

logandzwon · Jun 23, 2006

about the bootcamp/parallels sharing a partition, I have no idea if they will support it; I don't really think it make a big difference in their sales. However, as far the drive issue talked about, don't forget windows can support mutiple hardware profiles. It'll use one set of drivers when your in bootcamp, and other set when in your parallels.

majortom · Jun 24, 2006

Generally speaking there are a few strange things about Intel GMA in MacBooks (maybe also in MacMinis but I can't confirm as I own just a MB) such as performance which is not fluid and I did verify it in X-Plane and long menus's scrolling into the Finder (also: benchmarks result may vary form 15 to 45 refreshes/sec dependending on the moment - clock always 1.5GHz). I really don't know why performance changes within a second and another and I don't believe this is because of shared memory. I've monitored the problem with Open GL Driver Monitor but I wasn't able to figure out where the problem starts from. Concluding:
1) I'm going to see if something changes with the next release of the OS
2) answering strictly to your question: I perfectly agree with CELENDIS: "... however, since Parallels has no (hardware) 3d support, the effect on using Parallels would be insignificant (or less) between the two graphics platforms."
The same, in my point of view, about 2D.