Windows 10 on ARM locked at 1 GHz

C

cjonesca

Bit poster
I just got a 16GB MBA M1 and thought I'd try to the Parallels 16.5 + Windows 10 on ARM Insiders Build. Doesn't run well on my end and very slow. Locked at 1GHz. I've tried 2C/4GB, 4C/6GB, 6C/8GB, 2C/8GB and messed with numerous other settings to try and get something resembling performance out of it. I figure this is in the really early stages and is to be expected for sometime.

I'm just curious: is there anything that can be done to improve it or unlock the 1 GHz limit?
Is this a Windows 10 on ARM or Parallels limitation?
 
Ah ok, so it just runs poorly then. Well, hopefully it improves in time. The i7-8700B Mac Mini I have with Parallels and Windows 10 x86 is almost indiscernible from a native install of Windows. Would be awesome to see Windows ARM + Parallels get to that point.
 
I get the same results. I ran the same Novabench benchmarks on my 2019 & 2020 MacBook Pro's, both in Windows under Parallels and on the Mac side.
On the Mac side, it picked up the chips properly (though had to run the Benchmarks under Rosetta 2). Both the 2019 and 2020 got a CPU score of 1000, with a total score of 2000-2200, very comparable.
On the Windows Guest OS side, the 2019 got a CPU score of 572, half of the host PC's score. But on the M1 ARM side, the Windows 10 ARM Guest OS got a CPU score of 152, much less than half the host's score. It also only detected the CPU at 1GHz. The overall score on the Windows Guest OS' was around 1000-1100, with the 2020 M1 chip actually winning despite the abysmal CPU score, as the read/write storage part of the benchmarks were HEAVILY in M1's favour, quadrupling the 2019's score.
All in all, the machine is very powerful, but the ARM version of Windows 10 seems very slow, and Visual Studio feels even slower
 
That's great info Carson. Thanks. So I wonder why Parallels themselves do not acknowledge this?! Is it a bug with this Parallels version in combination with Win10 on ARM? Or is this just the max performance for now and it IS known. Hey Parallels please side in this thread now ;)

CarsonR1 said:
I get the same results. I ran the same Novabench benchmarks on my 2019 & 2020 MacBook Pro's, both in Windows under Parallels and on the Mac side.
On the Mac side, it picked up the chips properly (though had to run the Benchmarks under Rosetta 2). Both the 2019 and 2020 got a CPU score of 1000, with a total score of 2000-2200, very comparable.
On the Windows Guest OS side, the 2019 got a CPU score of 572, half of the host PC's score. But on the M1 ARM side, the Windows 10 ARM Guest OS got a CPU score of 152, much less than half the host's score. It also only detected the CPU at 1GHz. The overall score on the Windows Guest OS' was around 1000-1100, with the 2020 M1 chip actually winning despite the abysmal CPU score, as the read/write storage part of the benchmarks were HEAVILY in M1's favour, quadrupling the 2019's score.
All in all, the machine is very powerful, but the ARM version of Windows 10 seems very slow, and Visual Studio feels even slower
Click to expand...
 
I also have the same issue on Windows 10 for ARM Insider Preview and Windows 11 ARM64 build.

VM configuration is 4GB RAM and 2 processors (1 processor didn't do anything good to performance, same as setting 6 or 8 GB of RAM + Windows-macOS integrations disabled also didn't help). My device is MacBook Air (M1, 16GB RAM, 7 GPU cores). Windows sees CPU as "Apple Silicon" with 1Ghz.
Apps are running noticeably slower than my 2-core Intel MacBook Pro 2017, also featuring micro-freezes when you drag windows, opening Start menu or notification shade. Visual Studio lags too when opening XAML/CS files, resulting in an uncomfortable experience.

Personally I hope that performance issues will be fixed so I can fully replace my old desktop PC with M1 laptop.
 
DereckB1 said:
To all people in this thread who experience slow Windows 10 (also Windows 11 in my case): do you also have the memory going up to almost 100%?
Click to expand...
Hi, I had the same issue and wrote to support. They have answered to me:

You need to open settings of your windows VM -> Hardware -> Boot Order -> Advanced Settings -> Boot flags -> place there next string
devices.pci_balloon=0

I don't know what is doing that flag, but it helped me with memory consumption and still I have 1Ghz as a topic starter
 
I tried adding
devices.pci_balloon=0
but it didn't help much. I would like to know more about these performance issues. It is disappointing that Parallels seem to be simply pretending that they do not exist.
 
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