Support for new 12 core Mac Pro

A

adamsfbay_vm

Junior Member
Does the current version of Parallels for Mac support the upcoming 12-core Mac Pro with use of all 12 cores? If not, plans?

Thanks,

-Adam
 
Will Parallels perform better on a 6-core Mac Pro running at 3.33 GHz than a 12-core running at 2.93 GHz? I need help with a purchase decision. And I have trouble finding information on how Parallels uses multicore computers. Please enlighten us!
 
I don't know if Parallels supports 12 cores but I do know that on a 8 core Mac Pro, Parallels Desktop will allow a virtual machine to have up to 8 cpus. Performance gains will depend on whether or not you use applications in the virtual machine that perform better under multi-core processors and whether or not you will be running other virtual machines or processor intensive Mac applications at the same time.
 
I'm aware that Parallels 5 supports 8 cores on an 8-Core Mac Pro. I routinely use it on my current 8-Core Mac Pro with Windows 7 software that keeps all 8 cores pegged. It performs very well.

My question is - when I use Parallels 5 on the upcoming 12-core Mac Pro, will the VM support the use of all 12 cores? My software would take advantage of it unless Parallels has a current hard limit of 8.
 
More RAM allocation?

I was a little bit miffed that parallels would support 8 cores, but not more than 8GB RAM for each virtual machine... I had hoped that it would allow something like 30 out of 32GB RAM to be used for a VM...

Joergen Geerds
 
You can support more than 8 GB in the VM. Under preferences: memory just use manual settings to allocate as much of your system RAM as you like.
 
Thank you for your reply. Yes, it is possible to set more RAM allocation for parallels (see screen shot attached), but the individual VM is still limited to 8GB, unless there is another (hidden) setting somewhere... if there is, please tell me.
 

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I tried editing the config.pvs (inside the virtual machine .pvm bundle) file manually. For Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac, the maximum number of CPU's cannot exceed 8 and the maximum RAM for a virtual machine cannot exceed 8GB. Setting the RAM and CPU's manually beyond those limits results in an error message. See the attached screenshots.

Apparently, the limit depends on the product registration key. If you want to exceed these limits (get 12 CPUs or 64 GB of RAM), then you need to buy a different product (Workstation extreme or Server).

Here's some documentation that lists the limits:
Parallels Desktop for Mac 5.0
Parallels Workstation 4.0 Extreme (Windows only)
Parallels Server for Mac 4.0
Parallels Server 4.0 for Mac Bare Metal Edition

Even though you can't assign 12 cores to a virtual machine with the Desktop version, it may still perform slightly better than an 8 core Mac because the Mac OS will be able to use the other 4 cores for other stuff.
 

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While I completely agree with you that 8 of 12 cores are better than 8 of 8 cores (there aren't many applications that need many cores but not much RAM, it usually goes hand in hand), having only 8GB of RAM can be a bummer.

.
 
JoergenG said:
Thank you for your reply. Yes, it is possible to set more RAM allocation for parallels (see screen shot attached), but the individual VM is still limited to 8GB, unless there is another (hidden) setting somewhere... if there is, please tell me.
Click to expand...

Which version of Parallels Desktop do you use? I don't have the option to set RAM allocation.
7468231kfc.png
 
I just bumped to this thread while searching some answers, i strongly agree with JoergenG that 8 of 12 cores are better than 8 of 8 cores.
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