I have sent this to VMware's technical support:
Regarding Intel's twelfth generation (Alder Lake) and later CPUs, they have a mixture of P (Performance) and E (Efficiency) cores. Here's the problem: Workstation 16.x and earlier does NOT recognize the distinction between those two types of cores, confuses them, and FAILS TO WORK with both types simultaneously; in other words, to boot a Workstation VM on a a host system with such a physical CPU, it is necessary to use ONLY ONE CORE in the VM—OR TO DISABLE ALL THE EFFICIENCY OR ALL THE PERFORMANCE CORES via the configuration file beforehand. Either "workaround" results in a hobbled system, in which Workstation VMs are only able to utilize a limited number of available physical cores. That necessarily gives AMD CPUs an advantage going forward, until VMware fixes the problem with Workstation. So, Workstation 17.x and later needs to be fixed in terms of virtual CPU hardware, to be able to simultaneously use both P and E cores in Intel's twelvth and later generation x86 processors.
