Changing the Number of Virtual CPUs Allocated to a Virtual Machine
Parallels Desktop for Mac automatically calculates the maximum allowable number of virtual CPUs based on the number of physical cores in your Mac's CPU. Here is how the allocation works for N logical cores in the system (where N typically equals the number of physical cores in Apple Silicon systems and is double the number of physical cores in Intel-based systems, thanks to Hyper-Threading):
Note: Although most modern apps are designed with multi-core processors in mind, not all of them benefit from increasing the number of available cores equally. Increasing the number of virtual cores doesn't always lead to a corresponding improvement in performance.
To set how many processors are allocated to a virtual machine:
Open the Actions menu and choose Configure.
Click Hardware > CPU & Memory, switch to Manual, and select a number from the Processors menu.
Note: In Parallels Desktop for Mac, you can assign up to 4 cores to a virtual machine. In Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition, you can assign up to 16 cores.