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):
Productivity & Software testing
2 virtual cores for N<8 and 4 otherwise
Games only
Minimum even number greater or equal to N/2 (e.g., 8 for a 16-core CPU or 10 for an 18-core CPU)
Design & Software development
Maximum even number that is smaller or equal to N/2 (e.g., 8 for a 16-core CPU or also 8 for an 18-core CPU)
All other scenarios
2 virtual cores
*to learn more about profiles, please refer to this page of the guide.
However, if you often run multiple virtual machines concurrently, automatic core allocation may lead to resource conflict. We recommend configuring the number of CPUs assigned to every virtual machine manually. For the manual core allocation limits, please see this page.
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.
