Hello,
I’m considering getting a new laptop / mobile workstation and am wondering what cpu would be best for virtualization (Hyper-V mainly, but also VMWare workstation / player)? I was looking into the i9-12900h but have seen people mention that the mix of p-cores and e-cores screws up the VM experience. Anyone have any experience or thoughts? Seems all of the cpus out there now have the mix of P/E cores.
Thanks!
I’ve been running vmware workstation for ages, I’d go for a laptop with four ram slots, not many out there, my Lenovo P50 has 4 however. I’d also double check the max ram the processor can address.
VMware Workstation runs on pretty much anything, if you have a newish processor I don’t think you will have too many issues.
When it comes to labbing I recommend first making sure you will be running on a SSD and second is get the highest amount of memory you can find/afford. CPU can be important, but that usually becomes more important when virtualizing network appliances like routers/switches/firewalls.
So, yeah, I’m good with all of the other components. I’m just curious about the CPU because while doing some research I came across several messages with people having issues with the newer i9s because of the efficiency cores. From what I can gather, they essentially need to be disabled in bios for virtualization to work properly - which is a waste of a cpu. But I have no experience with this so I wondered if anyone else has.
I don’t necessarily need an i9, but figured if I’m spending $3k for a laptop I should make sure it does what I need it to do 
Yes, I would turn off any CPU power savings in the BIOS. This is best practice when deploying virtualization on a system (server or workstation). I’ve seen plenty of times over the years when an ESXi host is crawling because the default setting was left as power savings on.