I;ve viewed the posts. Which discribed why vista didn;t show the 2 processors. It said that go to msconfig->boot to enable HAL detect. But XP hasn't such thing.SO I have 2 question... 1.how to enable XP to detect 2 processors like vista? "numproc" isn;t work. 2.The real reason of why PD has no option to switch 1 or 2 processor. I;d like to recieve the Admin's answer,which must be the offcial answer.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but XP 32bit doesn't even have support for more than one processor. Likewise, XP 32 bit can use up to 2GB of RAM, but no more. I believe your question is moot, as XP does not contain this functionality. XPx64 can support as many processors as you want, but 64 bit windows XP doesn't run in Parallels.
dkp, XP Pro supports more than one processor? I didn't know this. Even if it does, how would this improve anything in Parallels? Doesn't Parallels hyperthread the processors behind the scenes anyway?
If it didn't all those schweet Intel Core Duo (and Core 2 Duo) chips would be a big waste. As far as assigning multiple procesors, it is correct that at the moment you cannot in Parallels. Even VMware (who does support 2 procs to a VM) suggest to NOT assign two processors to a VM if you only have 2 to begin with.
The SMP capability of XP Pro is of value on a Mac only when you use Bootcamp. SMP support in Parallels is FFR (for future release). It will probably not be of much use even then if you have only two procs but if you have 4 or more then running multiple VM's becomes feasible, and dedicating a proc (logically) to 3D support could make DirectX 10 workable. With that many processors it becomes viable to emulate a playstation type machine though, and Windows support becomes less of a need for gamers. That kind of thing would most likely come from the OpenSource world and DRM would be a big issue.
I believe it's slightly more complex than this. While Parallels exposes only a single core to the guest OS, threads spun off by the guest OS are ultimately handled by OS X's scheduler, making full use of all physical cores. This is why we sometimes see the Parallels process exceed 100% CPU usage. Parallels can be thought of as just another multithreaded OS X app.
