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I just ordered M3 Max Macbook Pro, currently own M1 Macbook Air. The one thing that I found the Air lacking is running VM with Windows 11, which I need for work
by Detrytus 3y ago
I just ordered M3 Max Macbook Pro, currently own M1 Macbook Air. The one thing that I found the Air lacking is running VM with Windows 11, which I need for work. All those translation and virtualization layers add up and CPU temp rises to 95 Celsius sometimes, visibly slowing down. I decided I need a laptop with active cooling.
If you have M1 Max, and a fan, then there's probably no point in upgrading.
- PaulWaldman 3y agoAre you expecting significantly improved efficiencies when running Windows VMs with the M3 Max Macbook Pro?
- Detrytus 3y agoThat’s pretty much the only reason I bought it. Other than the cool, “space black” color :-) Benchmarks look promising
- avidphantasm 3y agoI traded an M1 Pro for an M3 Max and my AMD64 Linux containers seem to be MUCH faster, so this would probably carry over to Windows VMs.
- trailbits 3y agoApple M1 does not support hardware assisted nested virtualization. If someone was trying to run WSL from Windows, that would be horribly inefficient on M1 vs M3.
- wtallis 3y agoIs there actually a way to use nested virtualization on the M2 or M3 yet? As far as I can tell both Parallels and VMWare are still saying they don't have that feature.
- lynguist 3y agoNo, it needs hardware support for that. It needs another level of virtualized MMU, which Apple didn’t build in. That might come with the M4 generation only.
- Detrytus 3y agoHere's someone claiming that the required hardware support is already there since M2: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/466761/is-nested-virtualization-is-supported-by-apple-silicon-chips-m2-m3 https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/466761/is-nested-v... I'm no expert so I cannot tell how reliable that info is.
- lynguist 3y agoThey also say > will cause the CPU to pause the guest hypervisor, and let the host hypervisor running at EL2 decide whether and how to proceed. That is a big part in enabling nested virtualisation. There are other details, for example related to memory and interrupt management. And they don’t elaborate on whether these "further details" were implemented or not; I would guess they’re not implemented, or else Apple would have mentioned it at a WWDC workshop. I might be wrong here though.
- dwaite 3y agoI'd be curious to see single/multi benchmarks of Rosetta 2-emulated code running across the various Apple Silicon CPU. My impression from the M1 was that only P cores could go into the stricter memory mode used for Rosetta 2 emulation.
- hypercube33 3y agoThere is always Windows on some vdi platform like Win365 or Amazon or Citrix etc so you're not tying up your devices resources. the downside is it's absolutely not available offline and can have a monthly expense.