Booting A PIII System In .8 Seconds

gizmo_mathboy writes: "General Software has announced the fastest BIOS boot time on record. The embedded system was clocked at 0.8 seconds from system power-on to transfer of control to LILO. This was on an Intel SOYO motherboard (440BX chipset) running a PIII 400. I think the quote of the article is: 'This Embedded BIOS quick-boot operation allows the device to restart and resume operations well within three seconds -- the maximum amount of downtime allowed per year for a device that must support "seven nines" or 99.99999 percent uptime.'"

Comments

...but when booting Windows

[Alien Perspective]

It's only 0.6 seconds from power-on to BSOD!

that is fast but...

[mandria]

sometimes i would like to have a sec more to press the delete button to get into the bios and change a few settings.

Do we want this?

[Wind_Walker]

I mean, seriously, what's the big deal if it's 0.8 seconds from power to LILO? I, personally, would rather have a BIOS that takes a few seconds to check the RAM, auto-detect devices, and check SCSI drives before it tries to boot the system.

Why are the geeks so concerned about things being as fast as possible? What's an extra 5 seconds of your life? If it takes that long to get things done (and get them done right) then I'm all for a 5 second start up. Yes, it's killed productivity, but let's look at the math: 5 seconds per computer, figure about 1000 computers booted up per month (50 computers, booted up once per work day). That means you're wasting about (carry the 2...) 80 minutes per month waiting for computers to boot.

Now think about the time it takes you to get coffee in the morning; we're talking about 30 seconds or so (if you don't take it black) every day; that's 480 minutes of wasted productivity

Don't get me wrong, this is great, but is it worth the implementation? The numbers say no.

For those interested in doing this:

[merlin_jim]

You can find the BIOS they used here. It has to be custom-tuned, but this kit includes the code itself, so you can build the BIOS yourself. They basically disabled most of the checks and auto-configure options; no disk seeks (reasonable enough in a highly reliable system), only check the first word of every 1K memory block, no auto-configure of IDE, etc.

I've been waiting for something like this for a while! My car MP3 player takes too long to boot up... can't wait to get my hands on this. No mention of cost, but I've sent an e-mail to their contact link and will reply to this message with price if/when they get back to me.

It's about time...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's taken 20 years, but they finally got a system
that can boot faster than a TRS-80.

just quicker to the inevitable...

[Anonymous Coward]

What good is a fast boot time, when you hit the brick wall at the end...

"my system can go from boot to blue screen of death in 3 seconds, biatch"

fear.

Geek

[TheLoneCabbage]

Wow! Geek perfection! Cold to LILO in 0.8 seconds. Women will flock to me!

Now if I can just get LILO working again...

slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot also has seven-nine uptime. Except it's not 99.99999%, it's 9.999999%.

0.8 seconds! wow!

[Kragg]

That means, if you add the 75 seconds for windows to boot, you get... oh. about same as it was.