any solution to Alder/Raptor Lake issue with p-cores / e-cores yet?

[tom39]

I didn't see any information, that VM WARE has solved the long existing issue, that p-cores and e-cores can't used at the same time with Workstation on Intel 12th and 13th generation.

If there is no reliable confirmation from WM WARE regarding a solution is available, I assume, the only way to work efficient is to switch to AMD Ryzen. 

I would appreciate any information about current status.

[mszcool]

I do have exactly the same problem on an i9-12900H. The host (Windows 11) performs like a charm, but the VMs in VMWare are really sluggish. That was not the case on Intel CPUs or AMD CPUs without E-cores. I have tried the following with the following outcomes:

* make sure the machine is plugged in and runs with "best performance" energy setting in Windows. VMs work better then, but the performance has still stutter moments, randomly. And, as soon as I unplug from power, we are back to unacceptable performance.

* bind the Virtual Machine in VMWare through processor affinity to p-cores. This, unfortunately, does not improve the experience. The VM performance is bad in both, plugged-in/best perf and un-plugged/balanced perf modes.

I could disable e-cores, but then I have paid for 8 cores which I cannot use (it is an 8 ecore + 6 pcore CPU).

What I would expect is the following: be able to determine the number of p-cores and e-cores to assign to the VM and the VM can leverage both, e-cores and p-cores in exactly the same, efficient way as the host does with the "Intel Thread Director". In other words, optimally, VMWare would be able to pass or virtualize the Intel Thread Director to VMs such that the guest provides similarly good performance as it did on architectures without p/e-core combinations.

Since I have paid for VMWare 16, and after that for VMWare 17 which resulted in an overall investment of € ~500,- it is truly disappointing that VMWare is not fixing this issue while Hyper-V/WSL2 on a Windows 11 machine seems to run like a charm...

[Technogeezer]

There are two hypotheses I have about this.

1. Microsoft isn't making the capabilities available to third party virtualization products to properly set the thread priorities when using Hyper-V as an upper-level monitor.
2. VMware is ignoring the capabilities provided by Microsoft.

I'd encourage as many users as possible to open support requests on this and force VMware to take action on this. This has been a problem for way too long. 

@Mikero @dariusd - what on earth is taking VMware so long to address this painful issue? The silence from VMware is unacceptable.

[tom39]

Since there is no response from VMWARE regarding the e-core issues, I have switch from Intel to AMD 7950X.

I have 15-20VMs with WIN 11 simultaniously running plus host with some load. Compared with my I7 I used before, it is a hugh step in performance. I expreinced in the past, that the Intel I7 stopped working for a while, when all cores are loaded to max. Sure, the Ryzen 7950X is a big step in performance anyhow, but I assume, that AMD is able to managed heavy multi core loads on VM WARE better than Intel is able to handle it.

And discussion about workarround of the e core issues are solved.

[AmD0709]

hi Tim

For that 7950x just curious how much ram and how is your storage setup? What's the host is?

Chewrs

[tom39 · Accepted solution]

Currently I run 15 VM guests simultaniously.

Each guest is using 2 processors, 25 GB storage space and 4GB RAM.

Host is an ASUS B650 PLUS WIFI board with AMD 7950X and 128 GB RAM total.

This setup is using 68-75% of the total RAM, depending on host activity.