E Core and P core support in VmWare Workstation Pro 17

[Carpangler]

Hi There.

I've just upgraded a PC to an intel I9 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-12900H 2.50 GHz
Compared to an older I7 the guests appear to run a lot slower. Looking at this further it seems that VMWARE Workstation is running on the E cores not the P cores. The performance is extremely slow. I cannot see a way of getting Workstation Pro to utilise the P cores. 

I've tried raising a support ticket but it says I've no support contract. This product was purchased 3 months ago and you can't seem to speak to support. Is this true?

Thanks a lot

Steve

[Technogeezer]

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@Carpangler wrote:

I've tried raising a support ticket but it says I've no support contract. This product was purchased 3 months ago and you can't seem to speak to support. Is this true?

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VMware has a 30 day complimentary support window from date of purchase of a new or upgrade license. Beyond that you'll either have to have a support contract or buy per-incident support (https://store-us.vmware.com/per-incident-support-workstation-pro-5424560200.html - costs about $50 USD) to open a support request.

IMO their policy sucks. Reporting a bug should be free. And this whole issue around Alder Lake CPUS is a pretty glaring bug, given the number of times people have encountered this issue.

It's not 100% clear if this is a Windows/Hyper-V issue (where their thread management doesn't have the ability to target CPU threads) or VMware's issue (they don't know how to use the features provided by Windows).  Either way, the problem exists and hasn't gotten any better.

There are several things you can try - search the Forum for them all. They include:

• Changing the power profile of Windows to Performance instead of Balanced.
• Disabling Hyper-V and all Windows features that use it (that includes Virtualization Based Security and Memory Integrity) so that Workstation reverts to using its own hypervisor instead of Hyper-V.

[Carpangler]

Hi, Ta for the reply

I’ve managed to increase performance by using the following

powercfg /powerthrottling disable /path "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\x64\vmware-vmx.exe"

This gave a big improvement. I’ve also converted the guest (RedHat8) to Hyper V and will test this on the same host for a like for like comparison.

I’ll also try some of the other options as I still think it should be quicker.

I wonder when VmWare will address this issue.

[matteoclc]

Hi,

I was facing similar issues, running on a laptop with i7-1265U.

In my configuration I have Hyper-v services enabled on Win10 because I'm also using WSL2. At the moment i'm running 3 single core RHEL9 VM.

I've found a workaround that fixed for now that is avoiding the VMs from running on the E-cores, I've done this editing the vmx files adding this block:

processor4.use = no
processor5.use = no
processor6.use = no
processor7.use = no
processor8.use = no
processor9.use = no
processor10.use = no
processor11.use = no

My CPU has 2 P-core and 8 E-core, so you have to adapt it to your cpu configuration

All working at the moment, I've also tried to put the laptop to sleep and after that it woke up fine

If you want give it a try and let me know

thanks