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How to disable the Efficiency Cores (E-cores) on an Intel NUC?

03.24.2023 by William Lam // 3 Comments

The Intel 12th Generation (Alder Lake) CPU is the first Intel consumer CPU that introduces a new hybrid big.LITTLE CPU architecture. This new hybrid Intel CPU architecture integrates two types of CPU cores: Performance-cores (P-cores) and Efficiency-cores (E-cores) into the same physical CPU die. For more information about this new hybrid Intel CPU design, check out this resource HERE.

These new hybrid Intel CPUs have also become the defacto standard for the Intel NUCs starting with the 12th Generation Intel NUCs (Dragon Canyon, Wall Street Canyon & Serprent Canyon), which were released last year. While the ESXi scheduler does not support or understand this new consumer CPU architecture, it can function with ESXi but does require an ESXi kernel boot option, which I have documented HERE, that tells ESXi to ignore the CPU differences.

While this has been an acceptable workaround, there are no guarantees on how the ESXi scheduler will behave. Furthermore, you will also not benefit from Hyper-threading (HT) on the P-cores as the E-cores do not contain HT-enabled cores and hence HT is also disabled by ESXi. A slightly better workaround is to actually disable the E-cores, which would give you uniform CPU P-cores and also access to HT. During my initial investigation, I was never able to figure out how to disable the E-cores within the Intel NUC BIOs and I had assumed it was just not possible.

I recently had re-inquired about this configuration change and came to learn that it is possible to change both the P-core and E-core settings within the Intel NUC BIOs, it was just not very intuitive!

[Read more...]

Categories // Home Lab Tags // Intel NUC

VMware Cloud Foundation on Intel NUC?

02.24.2023 by William Lam // 9 Comments

Say what!? 😎


As some of you may have noticed, the theme for several of my blog posts this week has been about deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) in a homelab environment.

To conclude this week, I thought it would be a fun experiment to see if I could leverage all the tricks that I have shared this week (here, here and here) and push the boundary even further and attempt to deploy a VCF Management Domain running on just a single Intel NUC?


Sounds crazy, right? I thought so too until I realized it was actually possible!

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, Home Lab, VMware Cloud Foundation Tags // homelab, Intel NUC, VMware Cloud Foundation

ESXi on Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast (Serpent Canyon)

11.18.2022 by William Lam // 4 Comments

The Intel NUC Enthusiast product line is typically geared towards content creators and gamers. These Intel NUCs, include Skull Canyon, Hades Canyon and Phantom Canyon, are all equipped with an onboard discrete GPU.


The Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast, codenamed Serpent Canyon, is the latest offering in this product line and it is also the first Intel NUC that includes both an Intel CPU and an Intel GPU, which is based on the latest Intel Arc graphics.

Within the VMware Community, both the Skull Canyon and Hades Canyon were extremely popular due to the additional graphics and storage capabilities at the time. With my recent updated findings on iGPU passthrough for recent Intel NUCs with ESXi and the combined compute and graphics solution from this latest offering from Intel, Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast can make for a pretty powerful and capable VMware setup!

Let's take a closer look at the new Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast from a VMware point of view!

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, Home Lab, vSphere 7.0, vSphere 8.0 Tags // homelab, Intel NUC, Serpent Canyon

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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Recent

  • How to disable the Efficiency Cores (E-cores) on an Intel NUC? 03/24/2023
  • Changing the default HTTP(s) Reverse Proxy Ports on ESXi 8.0 03/22/2023
  • NFS Multi-Connections in vSphere 8.0 Update 1 03/20/2023
  • Quick Tip - How to download ESXi ISO image for all releases including patch updates? 03/15/2023
  • SSD with multiple NVMe namespaces for VMware Homelab 03/14/2023

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