A couple of days ago, Apple announced spiffy new hardware, including the new Mac Pros. The top of line Mac Pro now comes with two, four-core Nehalem processors, which, thanks to Intel's Hyper Threading technology, each present eight virtual cores to Mac OS X. That's right: Mac OS X will see sixteen total cores on the new top of line Mac Pros. If you get yourself one of these beasts and are planning to run VMware Fusion on it, make sure you upgrade to the latest VMware Fusion 2.0.2 release, which is a free upgrade for all our customers (yes, including those who bought VMware Fusion 1 :). There was a bug in previous VMware Fusion releases that prevents the guest operating system from booting up on a sixteen-core Mac host machine, and we fixed it in VMware Fusion 2.0.2. Yet another reason to upgrade!
Update: for the tech heads among us (myself included), here is some great information at Real World Technologies on Nehalem's new virtualization features including Virtual Processor ID (VPID) and Extended Page Tables. Happy reading.
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Betty
http://desktopmemory.info
Posted by: Betty | March 20, 2009 at 10:49 PM
Are there any benchmarks or performance numbers showing the actual speed benefits of extended-page-tables support with VM-Ware Fusion on the new Nehalem systems?
I know there is supposed to be a large performance gain for VMs but I have not seen any numbers showing how much real-world effect this will have and how noticeable it would be for an average VMWare user.
Posted by: MedicalTourism | March 27, 2009 at 07:28 PM