Parallels recently released a preview version of Parallels Desktop 16 for M1 Mac . The company said that they created a "new virtualization engine that uses Apple M1 Mac chip hardware-assisted virtualization" to allow users to run Arm-based operating systems, such as Windows, in virtual machines.
"Users can run Windows applications on the Mac without restarting. It has the advantages of fast speed, simple operation and powerful functions. It includes more than 30 useful tools that can simplify daily tasks on Mac and Windows."
Since then, foreign media MacRumors tested the preview version of the software, but found that the effect was not satisfactory. "We installed Parallels on the M1 Mac and tested Windows, but it did not run smoothly."
The test team said that at the beginning, they installed and run the Parallels Desktop 16 preview version on the M1 Mac device. But after an hour, Windows began to encounter various errors during use, and its performance was very poor.
After encountering the problem, the team made some repairs and troubleshooting by asking for help from the forum, so that it can work normally and continue testing. In this regard, they said, “Parallels on M1 Mac is a technical preview version, while Windows can only be installed through Windows Insider, so these are not release versions of the software. Since we are using the Beta version software that is still under development, there are It’s not surprising that the problem needs to be resolved. Anyone who wants to test Windows on an M1 Mac through Parallels should expect a bug."
The specific test results are: when running the macOS Big Sur system, the M1 MacBook Pro with 8GB of memory has a single-core Geekbench score of 1719 points and a multi-core score of 7384 points. When running Windows 10 with Parallels using the default dual-core settings, the M1 Mac scored 1491 points for single-core and 2753 points for multi-core.
In terms of multi-core performance, this is very similar to Microsoft’s own Surface Pro X, but it performs better in terms of single-core performance. By default, Parallels only allows two cores when running Windows, but users can choose to switch to four cores.
After switching to four cores, the multi-core score can reach 5013 points, and the single-core score can reach 1518 points. Users can also choose to switch to eight cores, but this has little effect on performance. The single-core test result is 1524 points, and the multi-core test results are 5958 points. It is worth mentioning that there are some performance issues in quad-core mode. Therefore, it is best for users to use the two-core default settings as much as possible.
In addition, there are still many pre-installed applications that cannot run normally and often refuse to open; and some applications that can be opened and run normally have many bugs that need to be dealt with. However, third-party applications (such as Geekbench) seem to work as expected.
For example, Paint 3D, the Xbox application, and the "Calendar" application refused to work, but the Microsoft Edge browser and the Office application suite worked and worked well. Third-party applications such as Spotify and Notion also run well, and Windows VM can even play some early games, such as Civilization IV and Skyrim.