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Parallels disagrees with the benchmark

CNET recently did a performance comparison between Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. Surprisingly enough, their benchmark also suffered from unrealistic scenarios and vendor bias.

Pretty much everything about this test is upside down:

* It does not make sense to use an exclusive monster 8-core desktop for benchmarking Windows on Mac. Most people use laptops with 2 CPU cores and 2GB of RAM at most.
* Since Mac OS is the primary OS, it does not make sense to give both cores to a Windows VM that runs Word, Excel and Outlook. Office applications don't benefit from multiple CPUs. Perhaps that's why default configuration of Fusion is a single-CPU VM. Come on – most of the VMmark (server benchmark) workloads run in a single-core VM. Yet, desktop benchmark is run with dual cores – does not make much sense to me.
* It does not make sense to use Vista inside a VM. Most people run XP because Vista license only allows the most expensive Vista SKUs to run inside VM, not to mention application compatibility issues.
* It does not make sense to run QuickTime and Photoshop inside Windows VM. Why use Mac OS in the first place if not for running Mac OS-native multimedia apps?


Read the rest and judge for yourself.
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