Forums | MacLife

The Intel Macs are "PC hardware! With Apple's bootcamp, they have the ability to boot into Windows.

VirtualPC for the Mac OS currently emulates instructions for a completely different processor architechure (x86) into PowerPC instructions. VirtualPC for Mac OS is currently only for PowerPC Macs. With the Intel Macs, no such emulation is required because the Intel Macs are x86 (PC hardware). Because VirtualPC has to emulate a completely different computer in addition to running an additional OS, it is very, very slow.

In order of highest to lowest performance:
1. Bootcamp (rebooting an Intel Mac into XP)
2. Parallels Workstation (running XP inside OS X on an Intel Mac)
3. VirtualPC (using a PowerPC Mac to emulate PC hardware and then run XP on that emulated hardware, inside OS X)

A version of VirtualPC specifically for Intel based Macs that no longer has to emulate PC hardware (in other words, a version that essentially does what Parallels does) is coming, but has yet to arrive.

Last edited by Macskeeball (2006-04-30 3:35 pm)

adamjg wrote:

Then how well does "Parallels Workstation" compare to "Virtual PC's" performance? And how does it compare to PC hardware.

Parallels compares to VPC very good as long as you ignore the fact that Parallels Workstation only runs on Intel Macs and Virtual PC for OS X only runs on PPC Macs. That said not having to emulate hardware speed processes incredibly for Parallels. Of course I've heard rumors from a few sources VPC for Windows tends to run other OSes slow. (If that true, I suspect part of that is due to Microsoft planning it that way to keep people from looking too hard at those alternatives and part of that is due to multiple OSes having to share resources.) Then again I cannot speak from personal experience in this matter.

As far as your second question Parallels appears, from all the evidence on the Web, to run pretty fast. No exactly full speed (esp. in terms of graphics acceleration) but not very far from it in most tasks. One still can't expect to be playing games like Doom 3 or such using it though.