Last week, one of the most popular and well-known virtualization software environments available on Apple’s MacOS platform, Parallels Desktop, was added with an important, landmark development. Release 20.2.0, the third major package of the 20 major release, now enables emulation of x86 environments on Macs with Apple’s own processors (ie the M1-M4 series).
The innovation, which is still in the early test phase, can be used to easily create certain Intel-based (x86_64) virtual machines in a MacOS environment, so that developers using Macs can test their 32-bit Windows applications in a native environment. At the same time, the new version also supports the creation of x86_64 Linux virtual machines, which will be useful for those developers who have used such environments through Apple’s own solution Rosetta.
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The Parallels Emulator built into Parallels Desktop thus specifically supports x86_64-based Windows 10, Windows 11 (the Windows 11 24H2 edition is not supported due to the lack of SSE 4.2), Windows Server 2019/2022 and certain Linux distributions, with some restrictions and limitations.
This includes the performance factor, which, according to Parallels, still leaves something to be desired, to put it mildly: a Windows VM boots for at least 2-7 minutes, and the response time of the operating system cannot be considered fast in the least – although this strongly depends on the performance of the given Mac too.
Another limitation is that only a 64-bit environment is supported, but of course 32-bit code can also be run on the system. The USB connection is also not supported, that is, no external peripherals or devices can be connected to the VM, nor can the Parallels hypervisor be used, the VMs boot through the Apple hypervisor instead.
Parallels Desktop has supported Macs with Apple chips since version 16.5, and the last significant milestone came almost two years ago, in February 2023, when it officially supported the creation of a Windows 11 virtualized environment on these machines. With this development, however, it was only possible to run the ARM version of Windows 11, x86 VMs could not be created on the platform until now.
Source: www.hwsw.hu
