Running VMWare Fusion

You don't need a quad core or even an i5 or i7 to effectively run a VM like Fusion or Parallels. Mac users have been running those successfully for many years. I ran VMs on a 2008 MBP and a 2010 Mac mini, with no problems. Today's machines, including the Mac mini, are overkill for what you need to run Fusion, so you can make your purchase decision based on other factors. Most Mac users rarely come close to maxing out their CPU, no matter which configuration they buy.

 

Having ran both Parallels and Fusion on dual core and quad, I can say for my needs that the quad was by far a better investment. While either software will work on a dual core, if your applications are intensive, you will want to make sure they get as much resources as possible which includes - RAM and number of cores.

If you only open up your virtual system and stay within it and not jump back and forth to OSX host, then a dual core might be reasonable. If your apps don't take advantage of multi-core and threading, then dual core again is okay.

In my case, I use apps that take advantage of multi-core in the virtual and are doing heavy CPU work. While this is going on, I am doing other things in the host OSX and this combo doesn't miss a beat. I do have btw, 16 gigs of RAM on this machine as well as being quad core.

 

It really depends on what you're going to be doing.

Four cores only helps you if you can actually get them to be used.

The only things I do that really take advantage of my 4-core iMac (late 2009) is Xcode with C++ projects that are a decent size (hundreds of source files) and transcoding video.

I run VMs to test and develop software, but I really don't stress multiple CPU cores when I do that (I'm working on functionality in these cases... When I do load testing and performance testing I don't use local VMs for that becuase it doesn't relate very well to real deployments, even ones that use virtual servers.)

When in doubt and if your budget is tight, I'd probably go for a dual core.

 

Core 2 duo is a dog for Fusion. i7 with 16GB RAM runs it really well. Can even run 2 VMs at the same time really well.