8th Gen Intel CPU and Win7 Support

[DenzilNotDexter]

Hi

I am looking to purchase Workstation Pro for a new user,  It will run Win10 as a host OS on a new Intel 8th Gen CPU.

How does the HAL work with regards to 8th Gen CPU and OS's that dont support 8th Gen CPU's?  Do we have the ability in workstation to present a CPU as an older generation?

I.e.  Host = Win10 (on 8th Gen CPU)

     VM's =  Win7 32bit and 64bit

Id love to hear from anyone that has tried this, i suspect it would work but am not so sure with Microsoft and Drivers...

Thanks

Denver

[bluefirestorm]

In general you can mask the CPUID family/model/stepping of the virtual CPU of the VM. For example to mask the virtual CPU to look like a Haswell desktop CPU, you add the following line to the vmx configuration file of the VM.

cpuid.1.eax = "0000:0000:0000:0011:0000:0110:1100:0011"

I don't know if that is enough to fool Windows Update.

Note that it only changes the CPUID family/model/stepping and it does not change the capabilities exposed to the VM. If you want to cut out the features, more CPUID masking is required. The reverse is obviously is not advisable (i.e. fooling the VM that it has a CPU feature/capability that the host CPU does not have).