Virtualization vs. Dual-boot?

Hmm... this sounds quite intriguing...

http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/mac/

"Great Performance:
Driven by full support for dual-core processors and Intel Virtualization Technology (included in almost every new Intel-powered Mac), virtual machines created using Parallels Workstation 2.1 Beta offer near-native performance and rock-solid stability."

I think this is the first application that utilzes Intel's VT...

The benefit is that you can install just about ANY o/s now, not just XP. But the other real benefit is that instead of dual-booting and have 2 partitions unaccessible to each other, with VT you can actually transfer files, even cut/paste from one to the other...

Drawback obviously is going to be performance -- no clue what kind of hit it's gonna take, however, the "near-native performance" does intrigue me... heh

what are your thoughts on this? A better alternative to dual-booting?

cheers,

yass

 

Transferring files between the OSes would be nice, but you'd have to set Windows' filing system as FAT32 - Mac isn't able to write/change any NTFS files; it can only view them. Also performance takes a hit when running more than one OS, so to me, it wouldn't be worth the performance downgrade.

Might want to view this: http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20060406.html

It compares Parallel with Virtual PC and the new Boot Camp Method.

 

wsj didn't really have any benchmarks, since the guy who wrote it says in the article that he didn't have a chance to test Parallels' system...

What is interesting, is that Parallel claims to utilize Intel's VT -- which is *hardware* based, and it has been shipping in P4s already, just never fully utilized.

As far as I know, the god-awful VirtualPC does everything in codes, whereas Parallels actually uses the new CPU instructions to improve performance. Supposely these instructions would allow the CPU to run at near-native speed. I'm very curious to see some benchmarks on that.

Another good argument for it to have near-similiar performance is simply because of the nature of the dual-cores: it's just another way to utilize that 2nd core.

On some articles on VT:

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/263

here's Intel's own take on it:
http://www.intel.com/technology/computing/vptech/

cheers,

yass

 

It would be cool if we didn't see any major performance downgrades - it would make it something to seriously consider. Still, I'd prefer using just one OS at a time - you'd be able to take advantage dual-core apps and have a smoother computing experience IMO.

 

well, all you need to do is have a machine like the apple quad, which has dual dual core processors in it.

 

Don't forget the $3300 base price!

Oh, and the 16GBs of RAM would make for some fast performance too!

 

Dual booting would be the ideal solution for gamers, because games need as much system resource as possible. For day to day work, virtualization would be much simpler. It'd be great if Leopard includes options for doing both. Maybe enable you to install Windows on a separate partition but still allows you to load that partition as a virtual machine.

 

I don't think Apple is going to support the virtualization software, but that's just me guessing. Virtualization would probably be nice for business users, but the average person won't find a huge advantage with it unless they're handling a lot of documents that need to be hauled around and converted to both Mac and Windows formats.