The only right question is: it depends. Running many VMs does not imply you can utilize many cores. Scenarios like running sys-net, sys-firewall, sys-usb, a MusicVM, a WiresharkVM, an EmailVM and a WebBrowserVM is running many VMs at once, but maybe none of them will consume significant amount of CPU. Such situations are OK on my dualcore i7-7500U. Some VMs will be rather idle most of the time, some may consume rather I/O than CPU etc.
When considering many busy VMs running at once, it sounds rather like some server deployment than personal computer. But I admit there might be some such cases. Maybe you need to run multiple compilation/rendering/computation/whatever tasks simultaneously or you have some tasks that can utilize multiple cores at once. If that's your case, then many cores is probably a good choice. Anyway, Qubes does not differ a much from other OSes in terms of CPU utilization. You are likely to have more VMs, but each of the VMs will likely use fewer resources. I see two differences in CPU utilization between QubesOS and traditional OSes like Ubuntu: * Some virtualization-related overhead and some (usually not much CPU-intensive) processes run in multiple instances. I see this as rather minor overhead. And if this is your concern, you might be still more concerned about per-core performance than number of cores. * GPU emulation overhead. In Qubes, no VM except dom0 has access to the GPU, so some tasks are done on the CPU instead of GPU. In 3D games, this can cause high CPU load. Moreover, such load can utilize multiple CPU cores (up to 8).[1] OpenSWR can utilize even more cores, but my experiments with OpenSWR[2] weren't encouraging as a general-purpose replacement of LLVMpipe. I haven't tested how well llvmpipe scales over CPU cores, but in theory, it should be able to scale rather well, as it replaces GPU, which is essentially a CPU with massive (SMT) parallelization. Regards, Vít Šesták [1] https://www.mesa3d.org/llvmpipe.html [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/qubes-users/openswr|sort:relevance/qubes-users/xtovhQq5pSI/YS14xlgkAAAJ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qubes-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to qubes-users@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/032de085-a734-42e3-aa9a-92d87b7add6f%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
