This should reassure users who cannot do without a special software tool. However, users shouldn’t have too high hopes for the processing speed. Due to only four computing cores and eight GB of RAM, the performance shouldn’t be particularly impressive. Windows 11 requires at least four GB of RAM, says the Parallels knowledge base article. This leaves little available to operate macOS and Windows along with their respective programs. Since MacBook Neo also relies on passive cooling, the sparse computing cores would be throttled quite quickly under constant load, claims Parallels – although throttling tends to have other reasons.
Provider continues testing
Parallels is currently conducting further tests to cover as many user scenarios as possible; we will update the post if necessary. Parallels emphasizes that only ARM versions of Windows are supported, but most x86-based programs work without any problems. It will be interesting to see how much the performance of macOS drops: Howard Oakley found that VMs always occupy the performance cores. The A18 Pro only has two of these, plus 4 efficiency and five GPU cores.
Alternative providers
Apple has integrated the technology necessary for VMs into macOS, but without an operator interface. Other software developers also offer software solutions to install and operate virtual machines on Apple Silicon. The shareware VirtualBuddy by Guilherme Rambo is popular. VirtualBox, owned by Oracle, also enables the operation of virtual machines on Apple Silicon. Howard Oakley also offers Viable, a minimalist way to set up and operate VMs.