Quad-core chips

[dylan_childs]

Hi there,

I realise that I may not get much of an answer to this vague question but I'm curous, so even a guess on someone's part would be much appreciated. Does anyone know if: a) there is any chance that future VMWare Fusion versions will be able to use utilise a quad-core chip? b) whether there is a significant technical hurdle to overcome, or does the current lack of support represent an active choice by VMWare? I ask because I'm increasingly reliant on VMWare to run the windows-only WinBUGS / OpenBUGS software for a bunch of analysis relating to my work. Because this stuff is so computationally intensive there are significant gains to be had by running several instances of this program in parrallel (i.e. an "embarrassingly parallel" problem). Obviously I'm currently limited to using two cores at once but I could roughly halve computation time by completely utilising one of my quad-core chips.

Any comments / insights valued.

D

[VTMac]

<educated-speculation>VMware certainly has the no-how to make fusion support 4 (or more cores), but given that it is a consumer level target product, they appear to have chosen to limit it to 2 cores. I don't suspect we'll see 4 core support anytime soon .. at least not until 4 cores become common in consumer level Mac products.</educated-speculation>

Having said that, assuming you have ample memory, could you just duplicate your virtual machine and run two copies of the same VM, with each VM set to 2 cores?