Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake Performance Problem/Issue on VMware Workstation (12900K/12700K/12600K and their F and non-K variants) on Windows 11

Background

Many of you may have noticed slowdowns with VMware guests after upgrading to Alder Lake or Raptor Lake with E-cores, specifically noticing that VMs are pinned to E-cores when exceeding a certain number of virtual cores assigned to VMs.

This does NOT occur in Windows 10, on the 12th gen same CPU, for whatever reason.

New workaround (set and forget)

Thanks to u/GPDL1

1. Open a Command Prompt window with Administrator privileges
2. Run the commandpowercfg /powerthrottling disable /path “C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\x64\vmware-vmx.exe”

Original workaround / Temporary solution/fix

1. Open your Windows 11 Settings app
2. Go to Power
3. Change Power mode to Best performanceNote: If you do not see the “Power mode” option, you might be using a custom power plan – you MUST use Balanced power plan in order to adjust “Power mode”
4. Try running your VM again. You can now allocate ALL of your cores if you wanted, and it would perform as you would expect.
5. After you are done with your VM, it would probably be a good idea to change the Power Mode back to Balanced.