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Heads Up - Performance Impact with VMware Workstation on Windows 11 with Intel Hybrid CPUs

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There have been some recent reports from users observing performance issues when running VMware Workstation on Windows 11 along with using recent Intel (12th Gen and later) Hybrid CPUs, which introduces a new hybrid big.LITTLE architecture for Intel's x86 consumer CPUs.

This new Intel Hybrid CPU contains two types of CPU cores: Performance-cores (P-cores) and Efficiency-cores (E-cores) into the same physical CPU die, which follows a similar design to Apple Silicon CPUs. For information about the new Intel hybrid Intel CPUs, check out this resource HERE.

At first glance, most users had assumed this was due to Virtual Machines being scheduled to run on the less powerful E-Cores, this was problematic even for non-VMware use cases and with the recent introduction of Intel Thread Director, this was supposed to have been improved with Windows 11.

However, after some internal testing, the Intel Hybrid CPU may not actually be the culprit.

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ESXi support for Intel iGPU with SR-IOV

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Support for Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) was first introduced back in 2012 with the release of vSphere 5.1 and enables for a physical PCIe device to be shared amongst a number of Virtual Machines. The networking industry was the first to take advantage of the SR-IOV technology and could be used to help reduce latencies and improve overall CPU efficiencies for vSphere-based workloads that were network intensive.

Since SR-IOV is an extension of the PCIe specification, it can also be used benefit other non-networking devices. In 2016, AMD introduced their MxGPU technology which added SR-IOV capabilities to their GPUs which was then used to power VMware Horizon workloads, but this functionality was only available during the vSphere 6.0 and 6.5 release.

GPU sharing these days are synonymous to one vendor, NVIDIA. In 2015, VMware and NVIDIA teamed up to accelerate Enterprise desktop workloads through the integration of NVIDIA's vGPU (formally GRID) technology with the release of both VMware Horizon View and vSphere 6.0.

NVIDIA continues to dominate the GPU market in 2023, however another vendor has re-entered the market with an interesting solution that is enabled by the latest vSphere 8.0 Update 2 release ...

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ESXi on SimplyNUC Moonstone

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SimplyNUC has been a long time partner/reseller of the popular Intel NUC platform for quite some time but over the past few years, they have expanded their portfolio to include additional 4x4 systems that are completely designed in-house by SimplyNUC include Topaz, Ruby, Cypress and Chapel Rock to just name a few.


Moonstone is the latest 4x4 addition from SimplyNUC, which is an AMD-based kit that includes support for the latest AMD Zen 4 (Phoenix) and Zen 3+ (Rembrandt R) processors. The VMware Community has always been interested in an AMD-based kit but typically they do not work well due to the presence of a Realtek-based network adaptor, where drivers from Realtek does not exists for ESXi.

The first thing that caught my attention when I first heard about Moonstone was that this was an AMD kit that features an Intel-based network adapter as its primary network interface! ?

This definitely took me by surprise, not sure if AMD was making any statements about their networking choices or simply diversifying their networking options? ? Either way, I was not complaining and I thought this might be the first real viable AMD 4x4 candidate, from a VMware perspective, in quite some time.


Thanks to the SimplyNUC team, I did not have to wonder much more and I got the opportunity to put the Moonstone through its paces and see what it can do for the VMware Community!

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