M3 CPU cores have become more versatile

Re:M3 CPU cores have become more versatile by Detrytus on Friday January 05, 2024 @04:44PM (#38885385)

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.

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Re:M3 CPU cores have become more versatile by PaulWaldman on Friday January 05, 2024 @05:01PM (#38885568)

Are you expecting significantly improved efficiencies when running Windows VMs with the M3 Max Macbook Pro?

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Re:M3 CPU cores have become more versatile by trailbits on Friday January 05, 2024 @07:14PM (#38886850)

Apple 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.

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Re:M3 CPU cores have become more versatile by wtallis on Friday January 05, 2024 @07:38PM (#38887022)

Is 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.

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Re:M3 CPU cores have become more versatile by lynguist on Saturday January 06, 2024 @05:53AM (#38890349)

No, 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.

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Re:M3 CPU cores have become more versatile by Detrytus on Saturday January 06, 2024 @11:14AM (#38892607)

Here's someone claiming that the required hardware support is already there since M2: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/466761/is-nested-v...

I'm no expert so I cannot tell how reliable that info is.

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Re:M3 CPU cores have become more versatile by lynguist on Sunday January 07, 2024 @12:53AM (#38898865)

They 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.

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Re:M3 CPU cores have become more versatile by selimnairb on Friday January 05, 2024 @06:28PM (#38886511)

I 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.

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Re:M3 CPU cores have become more versatile by Detrytus on Friday January 05, 2024 @05:16PM (#38885745)

That’s pretty much the only reason I bought it. Other than the cool, “space black” color :-) Benchmarks look promising

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Re:M3 CPU cores have become more versatile by bombcar on Friday January 05, 2024 @05:18PM (#38885774)

Are these Arm windows 11 or x86-64?

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Re:M3 CPU cores have become more versatile by Detrytus on Saturday January 06, 2024 @04:30AM (#38889930)

ARM, occasionally running x86 windows software

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Re:M3 CPU cores have become more versatile by dwaite on Friday January 05, 2024 @10:18PM (#38888050)

I'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.

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Re:M3 CPU cores have become more versatile by hypercube33 on Saturday January 06, 2024 @11:30AM (#38892751)

There 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.

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