Pentium III (or higher) emulation?

I need Pentium III emulation in order to be able to install and run MS SQL Express 2005 under Windows 2000 SP4 running within Parallels. Can Parallels 2.1 on the Mac emulate a Pentium III or higher, or will it be able to in the future?

Thanks, and keep up the great work!

 

Why should it emulate a CPU?
You will see the actual intel dual core chip, thanks to vanderpool.

 

What's vanderpool?

All I know is that on page 8 of the Parallels for Mac OS X User Guide, it states the following: "Parallels Workstation virtualizes a full set of the standard PC hardware including...CPU: Intel Pentium II." I have tried unsuccessfully to install SQL Express '05 under Parallels and Win2k -- SQL Express requires a PIII (the PIII feature on which it depends is cache prefetching, I am told).

 

Vanderpool is the name fo the feature in the Intel Mac (formally, Virtualization Technology-x) that allows the operating system running under Parallels or a similar package to gain control of the host CPU. No emulation is necessary or involved.

I can't tell you why SQL Express isn't finding the feature it needs, unless it's something that requires OS cooperation at the lowest levels of the system

 

hrm...i installed it just fine. Downloaded and installed .net and then SQLExpress 2005.

-Levi

 

On machines that support VT, the Windows environment sees an Intel Core family processor. Nothing is emulated, and it's not a Pentium II. That old "Pentium II" thing is boilerplate, and probably is the instruction set/ISA they're emulating when they have to do it in software. The machines that support VT (all Intel-based Macs but a few Mac minis), the real processor is visible/available to the PC environment.

 

That's what I would expect as well.

But, the System control panel reports the CPU as "Genuine Intel CPU 1500 @ 2.00 GHz".

And, for the heck of it, I tried the Intel Processor Identification Utility. It refused to run, claiming I had an older processor and I needed to use the older utility.

About Parallels reports that my virtualization mode is Intel VT-x.

 

On my machine (a MacBook Pro), it shows "Intel Core T2500 @ 2.00 GHz".

 

Which OS are you running as a guest? I'm running XP SP2.

 

Here's are some more questions:

Did you install the MacBook Pro firmware update from Apple?

What's your notebook's serial number? Mine starts with W8607...

 

Ok, I just looked at it (I didn't have my MacBook Pro with me at the time), and actually what it says is:

Genuine Intel(R) CPU
T2500 @ 2.00 GHz

("T2500" represents a Core Duo T2500, the CPU in this MacBook Pro, so it's seeing the Intel Core processor directly via VT, as it should be. So it doesn't say "Intel Core T2500", just "T2500", but the only thing that "T2500" even refers to in this context is the Intel Core processor of that model.)

 

Interesting...

I installed the MBP firmware update and now XP is reporting that the processor is a T2500 just as it does for you.

If you take a close look, you may note that it reports 2 speeds, one for each core. (I wonder what would happen if I upgraded to the multi-processor XP kernel...)

 

XP Pro already supports 2 cores from the get-go, therefore I wouldn't expect anything different even if you used the Server versions of the XP which support more processors.

BTW, my firmware-upgraded Core Duo Mac mini reports T2300 @ 1.66GHz in Windows 2000 Pro SP4 in PW.

 

Wesley - Have you been able to install SQL Express 2005 under Win 2000 SP4? That's what I'm trying to do on my MacBook Pro (10.4.6, firmware update installed, PW beta 2), but no luck so far. Since I installed Win 2k on PW beta 1 before applying the MBP firmware update, is it possible that I need to reinstall it in order for Windows to "see" the Core Duo and not a PII?