VMware workstation allows me to select more than no. of cores i have?

[Anony23]

I'm using this processor which is stated to have 4 cores: https://ark.intel.com/products/88196/Intel-Core-i7-6700-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_00-GHz

I could however select up to 8 cores (selecting more than 8 cores give a warning). Why is that so?

[wila]

Hi,

This is because of something called Hyper-threading where each thread presents itself as if it is a logical core.

Eg. two threads on a single physical core are seen as two logical cores.

While you might be able to create a VM with that many cores, I do not really expect it to work well.

Personally I wouldn't assign more as 4 cores, more likely even less as I tend to run a multitude of guest OS's at the same time and like them all to be performant.

But as workloads can be quite different, you can certainly experiment.

--

Wil