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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.'"
>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.
It says "embedded system". If you put a cpu in as a brake or steering controller into something that moves at any reasonable speed, you would like it to return service as soon as possible after a power glitch.
No, this does not mean that they make embedded controllers with crashes as a design goal. It means they want to make something that is as error-resistant as possible. Not for your desktop box, in other words.
Obtw: very few of those systems have anything like Linux or Windows on them, even though some people would like to tell you otherwise.
http://developer.intel.com/design/intarch/pentiumi ii/pentiumiii.htm
It shows a low power pentium III at 400 MHz.