Intel Slashes Computer Startup Times

An anonymous reader writes "At Intel's Developer Forum in Taiwan, Intel introduced a new Non-volatile caching technology called 'Robson'." The new Robson cache technology allows computers to start up almost immediately and load programs much faster. Intel declined to comment on the specifics of how the technology works only saying that 'More information will be revealed later'.

Comments

I wonder

[venya]

Hmm... I hope this doesnt require big changes to computer architecture...

Re:I wonder

[jthorpe]

It won't - it's just a new advanced marketecture from Intel.

Re:I wonder

[michelcultivo]

And how long does it take to boot Mac OSX?

The REAL reason

[cdrdude]

The real reason more informatin will be revealed later is that their computers are still booting up!

Re:The REAL reason

[haraldm]

For me, this sounds like a company trying to prevent customers from going elsewhere soon. Announce early, release late if at all, keep customers. It's not that we didn't see this before. Is anybody else known to work on something like that?

Hmmm.......

[_Sharp'r_]

So are we going to all be expected to hibernate our Robson's now?

Why does this sound like a CowboyNeal joke to me?

Re:Hmmm.......

[DigiShaman]

You sound as though you make an inclination to a flaccid penis.

Ohhh come on!! It's a joke! Laugh ;)

I hope this is real

[Monstard]

I hope this is real and not vapor-ware. I've been waiting for instant start for 20 years.

Re:I hope this is real

[JoeCommodore]

Man, you need to upgrade your hardware if it takes THAT long to boot your system!

Re:I hope this is real

[saskboy]

Things like Digital Cameras would benefit from this instant start technology. Really there's no reason I can fathom why they don't start instantly already. It's a blessed camera for gosh sakes, the only variables when it "boots" is how much memory is available. I'm sure people lose good pictures all the time because they don't anticipate the 3 seconds for the zoom lens to pop out, and the computer to get ready or do whatever it does.

Re:I hope this is real

[Sloppy]

I've been waiting for instant start for 20 years.

Uh.. 20 years ago, you probably had it. My VIC-20 took less than a second from powerup to the READY prompt. My Amiga 500 was slower, but still a lot faster than anything modern. My Amiga 3000 was even slower, because I had it do more. My 5-year-old Linux boxes are even slower to boot than that.

Computers just keep getting slower. I'm afraid to see how slow a new dual-Opteron machine is.

Re:I hope this is real

[AuMatar]

Most of the boot time of a camera isn't memory loading, its hardware initialization and calibration.

Re:I hope this is real

[VincenzoRomano]

Uh.. 20 years ago, you probably had it. My VIC-20 took less than a second from powerup to the READY prompt. My Amiga 500 was slower, but still a lot faster than anything modern. My Amiga 3000 was even slower, because I had it do more. My 5-year-old Linux boxes are even slower to boot than that.

My solar powered desk calculator needs half a second to boot, while my desk lamp shows a zero seconds boot.
And it takes 15 to 20 minutes for me to be ready in the morning.
Maybe the rule is: the more complex the OS, the longer the boot!

Re:I hope this is real

[bezza]

Anandtech did a review on Gigabyte's i-RAM product that is available now. Basically it takes 4GB of DDR DRAM and treats it like a SATA drive. Booting windows from this yielded no speed up, generally because most of the time was spent waiting for hardware to initialise.

The review is here

Re:I hope this is real

[6031769]

I remember how quickly windows 3.1 went down. :-(

Re:I hope this is real

[Eric604]

It's not the advances in hardware that makes computers slower, it's the software which is growing out of proportions. There is no need to go back to the VIC, we 'only' have to put that old OS on modern hardware; If we put amiga os on modern hardware it will boot in 2 seconds instead of the 10? seconds on original hardware. So, don't be afraid of the dual-Opteron, it won't make things slower. Just don't update software, especially the OS.

Re:I hope this is real

[moro_666]

yeah, your notice is sad but true.

windows people are so fooled by the fast desktop picture, they dont realize that the system is dynamically still loading and just lagging behind, even if they get their windows picture up in 15 seconds, they still have to wait 20 seconds at least until they can really start to do just about anything.

windows doesnt start any faster than linux, the first image comes sooner and sadly most of the stuff is loaded under cover (bill's surprise), but if you have a sensible amount of stuff installed, linux boots way faster up to the moment when something can really be used by the user.

If Transmeta licensed it...

[Black Parrot]

Would we get a Robson Crusoe?

Apple?

[great throwdini]

FTFA: "It's up to the [equipment manufacturers] to decide how it will be implemented. My guess is that enterprise users will likely see it first," [Mooly Eden, VP and GM of Intel's mobile platform group] said.

S.Jobs: "Oh, yeah?"

...one can dream.

If this kind if thing is a concern

[cxreg]

you're booting too often

Re:If this kind if thing is a concern

[ChrisGilliard]

Actually, maybe the reason we're _not_ rebooting too often is because this technology has not existed. No one will wait 5 minutes for a computer to startup, but this might make it more reasonable to do so. With the current energy crisis, I like this idea.

Re:If this kind if thing is a concern

[bypedd]

Agreed, but perhaps that's the Unix background peeking through. Windows in general needs too much rebooting, I say. More time should be spent on making it more dynamic and flexible so you don't have to restart your computer every time you uninstall a program or update windows.

Re:If this kind if thing is a concern

[freidog]

Perhaps.
But if you view this as a replacement for 'Standby' or similar low power / no wait modes it makes some sense. Where you can leave the computer for 10 minutes or 8 hours and no worry about drawing power, producing heat (or being vulnerable to power failures, ect).

I know standby isn't exactly a power hog - probably less than 30W for most systems and 'off' is in the range of 5W maybe more if you do wake on lan or similar - but if you're a coperation with thousands of computers in the building, quick boot from off might make more sense than standby or similar.

Re:If this kind if thing is a concern

[jbrader]

This could really help out laptop users though. My desktop only gets turned off if I'm installing new hardware or something but I turn my lappy off everytime I put it away. And all those turn on times really begin to add up after a while.

Re:If this kind if thing is a concern

[martinX]

If you'd posted with your name, I'd now know more about you than I ever really wanted to.

That would be bad enough, but since you posted AC, I now suspect everyone...

Re:If this kind if thing is a concern

[Comatose51]

Windows XP user, can't help it.

I kid, I kid.

I reboot maybe once a week. However, I also work in IT and a reboot really does solve a great majority of problems on the platform. It's not so much the OS as other programs. The worst part is that Windows doesn't have an unconditional kill so some process just never dies and never lets go of all the files and handles. So when you go to restart the program, it fails because a previous instance is still hanging onto the files/handles. So we have to reboot the machine.

The thing that drags when we reboot our big Dell workstations isn't so much loading the OS as loading other programs and the SCSI detection process. Then there's the log in script that runs. Robson will only really help with a small chunk of the total boot-up time. As our computers get more networked, I expect network lag to drag us down as well during boot-time.

Re:If this kind if thing is a concern

[quantum bit]

The worst part is that Windows doesn't have an unconditional kill so some process just never dies and never lets go of all the files and handles.

Yes it does. Killing a process from task manager is the same thing as kill -9. When the process dies it unconditionally releases all file handles, mutexes, and any other resources that it had open.

The only time that won't work is if the process is stuck in a system call somewhere (i.e. in the kernel). That usually means buggy device drivers which unfortunately are all too common in the Windows world. It could also be a bona-fide kernel bug, though those are fairly rare (but I do know of one way to cause a vfs lockup on any version of NT -- including fully patched 2k3 server -- without admin rights).

I see the same thing happen all the time on Linux. For example if a process is stuck trying to read a file that's on an nfs server that has become unreachable, not even kill -9 will get rid of it. Even *BSD sometimes gets unkillable processes in cases where the underlying hardware has gone to lunch. I see it sometimes with flaky CD burners, for example.

Re:If this kind if thing is a concern

[hazem]

My box at work is a win2k. I come in, turn it on, and then go make a liter of tea. When I come back, it's just popping up to leg me log in. I log in, then go down to the vending machine 4 floors down (walking both ways) to get a snikers or something and come back. Right about that time, it's finally doing all it's post-login stuff and I'm ready to work. That's a good 10 minutes out of my day.

I don't know what I'll do if they make the damn thing boot up immediately. My boss would probably expect me to start working too.

Not all progress is a good thing!

Re:If this kind if thing is a concern

[m50d]

You care about your energy use?

Re:If this kind if thing is a concern

[MSZ]

Yes it does. Killing a process from task manager is the same thing as kill -9.

ROTFL.

Unix "kill -9" will terminate any process, regardless of the process' attempts to keep going. Windows task manager will kill almost any, but not all processes, most of the time. But when you really need it, it turns out you hit that "almost" part.

The difference is, in unix type systems, SIGTERM and SIGKILL are handled by the OS and the process is only informed of them (so it can try to shut down properly), in Windows, the process is being asked nicely to close. Windows process is free to ignore these events.

Thus it's quite easy to end up with unkillable process. Not to mention that some processes are considered system (or something) and task manager will refuse to kill them flat out. On Linux you can kill even init if you like (not a wise thing to do - but you can).

There is no unconditional forced kill in Windows. Even MS admits that.

Re:If this kind if thing is a concern

[neurovish]

A large part of the problem is Win2k..XP boots up much faster.
Linux boot times depend largely on the distribution...my Gentoo box at home boots up in about 20 seconds, and the same goes for Slackware. At work however, Novell's linux flavor du jour (SuSE, NLD, or SLES) takes a good 2 minutes. My work desktop boots into XP much faster than Novells Linux.

Re:If this kind if thing is a concern

[quantum bit]

The difference is, in unix type systems, SIGTERM and SIGKILL are handled by the OS and the process is only informed of them (so it can try to shut down properly), in Windows, the process is being asked nicely to close. Windows process is free to ignore these events.

No, no, and no. It's true that in the "Tasks" or "Applications" tab, hitting End Task will send a request (WM_QUIT) to exit. That's not what I'm talking about. I mean the Processes tab. That is handled by the OS; it routes through Win32 first but ends up at NtTerminateProcess (ZwTerminateProcess). Go read the API reference or even the DDK if you don't believe me. Maybe in the dark days of Win9x that was true, but the NT kernel is a real OS, no matter what other crap you layer on top of it.

There are only three states a process can be in where it's unkillable.

1. "Access denied". This happens on some system processes because they run as the user SYSTEM (equivalent to root), where your task manager process is not. The security descriptor on those processes is set so that nobody except SYSTEM (not even Administrators) can kill them. They can be killed by running task manager as SYSTEM. There are various methods to run a process under the system account; the easiest is by using the "at" command to have the scheduler service start it. Newer versions of task manager also have a list of processes it will refuse to kill, but you can still kill them by using pskill or some other third-party utility that has no such restrictions.

2. Process is stuck in the kernel somewhere. Happens when system calls never return, which isn't supposed to happen. Often due to bad drivers -- even with flaky hardware it SHOULD timeout eventually. I've seen add-on firewall software that hooks the TCP stack and can cause this condition. Sometimes you can get one unstuck by kicking the kernel in the head (i.e. removing or stopping the offending device), otherwise a reboot is the only way to clear it. Unless you're running a checked build with a remote serial debugger, but not many people outside of driver developers do that.

3. Process has a debugger attached. In this case, simply kill the debugger instead.

Re:If this kind if thing is a concern

[quantum bit]

most remarkably virii and malware manage to get unkillable quite easily. Flaky security or the unability to chmod your stuff may have something to do with it.

A lot of malware isn't unkillable in the traditional sense. What it does is run 2 processes that act as a watchdog for each other. Kill one and the other one starts it back up. They probably got the idea from MS even -- back in the day Windows used two system threads that watched out for each other and kept you from tweaking the registry key to turn NT Workstation into NT Server.

A technique I like to use for killing those is to find the EXE file that is being re-launched every time you kill it. You won't be able to delete it because of Win32's breaindead filesystem semantics, but you can change permissions on it to deny access to everyone. Then when you kill one of the processes, the other one isn't able to start it back up. I've yet to see any malware smart enough to change permissions back on the file, so for now anyway it's an effective way to kill them.

News for Nerds!

[dj245]

Stuff that will be revealed at a later date, if market conditions warrant its release.

My theory

[JoeCommodore]

is that it captures a post boot image into flash and will flush it out if you cange something in the core os or hardware. The only thing I wqorry about is if you get some sort of corruption of the image without being reconfigured (like proxy poisoning). I'm assuming (if it uses such a method) it would be well checksummed for integrity.

From TFA

[mincognito]

The laptop with Robson also opened Adobe Reader in 0.4 seconds, while the other notebook required 5.4 seconds.

Presumably, the other notebook was running Intel's next generation CPU with sixteen cores.

Should Boost Battery Life a Lot

[BondGamer]

The biggest application for this will probably be laptops. If the computer has 1GB of space for a page file and other stuff, then it will spend a lot less time accessing the hard drive. Less hard drive spinning means longer battery life.

Re:Should Boost Battery Life a Lot

[swf]

Just think of the performance increase from putting the page file into RAM!

Re:The big secret...

[macklin01]

While cute, that's not entirely accurate. A well-maintained WinXP installation with antivirus installed still boots in the 30 second range on a P4 with a decent amount of RAM. It's the extra stuff that can really slow it down. (OpenOffice or MS Office, taskbar goodies, etc.)

Just like a really good Gentoo installation can boot up very quickly, but it can take awhile to go through the process if it isn't so well-optimized. Out-of-the-box on a dual boot P4, it's been my experience that WinXP boots faster than out-of-the-box Linux. (But I'm not enough of a linux guru to trim it down.) -- Paul

I don't get the "instant-on" craze

[ZombieRoboNinja]

I've been hearing this touted for over a decade, now. "In the future, your PC will turn on as quickly as your TV!"

The thing is, I don't care how long my computer takes to boot. With decent sleep and hibernate modes, I don't need to boot more than a couple times a month anyway - and that's usually rebooting for software updates. (If you're wondering, this is on a PowerBook G4 laptop).

It takes my computer under a second to wake up from sleep mode. How much more "instant" does it need to get?

Now, those quick-loading programs, on the other hand, do sound appealing...

Re:I don't get the "instant-on" craze

[Gilgaron]

On the other hand, my HDTV takes longer to turn on than the old TV, so perhaps they were expecting the times to move towards one another ;)

Re:I don't get the "instant-on" craze

[corpsiclex]

meanwhile, for digital cable users, our tv's have slowed down.

Re:The big secret...

[ZakuSage]

As much as I don't like Windows, I really shouldn't have to wait close to a minute for Ubuntu to get to the login screen, and then another 30ish seconds to get into GNOME when Windows 2000 does similar things in about 1/10th of the time on the same hardware.

Faster to?

[SWroclawski]

If I were using Windows, I could start my computer in seconds.

And have it then crash in... seconds.

Has anyone RTFA?

[Ricardo]

This doesnt seem to be about start up times at all (except from Hibernation). All it is, is a large HDD cache. This will do nothing to make PCs "Start up" Faster. It only has affect in the Article [aparrently] because the "slower" laptop had put its HDD to sleep.
I think PC Hardware and Software manufacturers really do need to work on the glacial boot times that PCs have. Unfortunately, this is only a solution to some of the minor problems, and not the main ones.

Re:Has anyone RTFA?

[swillden]

Happening right now, search for "init-ng". It apparently works well but is still under heavy development so it's not stable enough to include in any mainstream distro.

Debian testing includes it. Not as the default option, but it's apt-get installable. I'm using it on my laptop and it's very nice.

This will probably only be for Windows PCs

[Chrismith]

Windows User: Hooray! Now that my computer boots in six seconds, my productivity will be way up!

Linux User: Boo...ting? Oh...that thing I had to do when I first plugged it in. Gotcha.

Re:This will probably only be for Windows PCs

[miffo.swe]

Well, its like this...

I have electrical heating and every watt my computer spews out is a watt less for me to warm up with central heating. As long as the computers dont generate more heat than i have to supply from my electrical furnice its not a loss for either the planet nor the bill.

I suppose you ride your bicycle to work and never drive by car or take the bus? If you do, you have done worse for the nature in a couple of miles than a computer does in its lifetime.

We've had this tech for a while...

[thepotoo]

...it's called hibernate.

Seriously. My 1ghz, 256mb RAM laptop can turn off, "caching" the data in about 4 seconds, and start up in about 8.

If that's not good enough, try my 2.93ghz/1g RAM gaming desktop - 7 seconds for a clean start up (no hibernate).

Besides, who actually shuts down their computers any more? I mean, with more people using bittorrent at night, or just turning off monitors, I don't really worry about start up times. Do you?

Re:We've had this tech for a while...

[Chirs]

7 seconds from the time you hit the power button until you can start up applications? I call BS.

Instant Startup Isn't All New

[Phat_Tony]

I read that instant startup was supposed to be a feature of the Apple Lisa, and I thought I'd heard before that this had been implemented, but I couldn't quickly Google up any references to it.

At any rate, the theory behind instant startup isn't too hard, it's just an engineering implementation.

All you do is make it so that, following shutdown procedures, the computer immediately switches to startup, except keeping track of the fact it was "shut down," not "restarted." When it finishes restarting, it writes the startup RAM state to disk, then turns itself off.

Upon being turned on, the computer just writes the stored RAM state back from the disk to RAM, and presto! It's just like starting up the computer, except really fast. At least, that was the theory. I've been sort of surprised not to see this implemented, it seems like everyone would like to see fast startups, but hardly anyone cares how long it takes to shut down (especially with soft power)- you're done with he computer anyway. I've heard that a lot of work goes into decreasing boot times for Windows and OSX. It seems like a lot less work to implement an "instant startup" plan, and then not have to care much if startup takes forever, than to carefully track, fiddle with, and optimize everything that happens during startup.

Of course, with this system, restarting after a crash would not be instant, it would take just as long as ever. So it might work to greater advantage on some operating systems than others, depending on why you usually restart.

Re:Instant Startup Isn't All New

[Just Some Guy]

Upon being turned on, the computer just writes the stored RAM state back from the disk to RAM, and presto! It's just like starting up the computer, except really fast. At least, that was the theory.

The reality ain't so hot. In the meantime, your network connections have dropped. Your Kerberos ticket or domain login has expired. Your clock has drifted but your NTP client hasn't noticed that it hadn't been running in hours.

There's nothing earth shattering that can't be explicitly dealt with, but the problem is that there are a million and one little things that you'd never think of that have to be accounted for. It'd be like you waking up from a year-long coma, and realizing that you'd lost your job and your girlfriend even though it only felt like you'd been away for five minutes.

Re:The big secret...

[Wizarth]

I find the same thing. My kernel takes much longer (well, twice as long) as windows to boot up. This is mostly because I've compiled all my device drivers into the kernel, so everything gets detected during this stage. I suspect (but haven't bothered to find out) that if I had all the not-immediately-needed drivers as modules, and ran hotplug in the background rather then in the foreground, then everything would start up faster.
Maybe, anyway.

DOH!

[Spy der Mann]

From TFA:

"Chipmaker demonstrates 'Robson' flash memory to boost laptop startup speeds."

Mystery solved.

Uses for fast boot

[clickme]

A very fast boot might make emulation less important. Need to run a Windows program? Boot into Windows in a few seconds and run it. Need a system optimized for gaming? You can have it in a few seconds. This could be very useful...

Re:Slightly OT question about linux boot times

[mrMango]

Look into ifplugd. emerge ifplugd.

Also, try using the ~x86 baselayout... they've GREATLY improved things from the standard.

Yes, this is OT

Re:The big secret...

[mrMango]

Ah, but once you get into GNOME, your system is up. Running. Finished. When you're in Windows, after you login you're still loading services. That's how Windows seems fast: it throws up a login screen before it's done loading. Linux doesn't do that.

If they just took the crap out...

[Animats]

The laptop with Robson also opened Adobe Reader in 0.4 seconds, while the other notebook required 5.4 seconds.

This isn't a load time problem. It's a load crap problem.

"Loading and verifying WebBuy.api" (does anyone ever use WebBuy, Adobe's DRM system for PDF documents?)
"Checking for updates" (Adobe might have changed the format of PDF again.)
Loading ad content for toolbar. (Sigh.)

And then all the crap that's being downloaded has to be scanned for viruses. It's all that junk that's the problem.

Of course, OpenOffice isn't all that great on launch time either. And no, loading it at boot time isn't the answer.

Re:If they just took the crap out...

[NotAnotherReboot]

Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but Acrobat 7 finally fixed the issue of loading a bazillion plugins at startup that almost no one uses. I believe it now dynamically loads them as needed.

Load times for Acrobat 7 vs. Acrobat 6 are clearly far less. The fix often mentioned is to delete/move non-key plugins from the Acrobat plugin folder, but their solution finally fixes the problem in an elegant way.

"DANGER, DANGER, WILL ROBSON!"

[Caspian]

(The message to be displayed when the cache gets corrupt...)

*dodges tomatoes*

Let's hope theres a quick way to zap this saved

[plasmacutter]

state clean, or else this will become yet another avenue for viruses and DRM to stubbornly cling to user's systems.

Built in obsolescence?

[draxbear]

Isn't there a lifespan on NAND flash memory in terms of read/write. I'm wondering how they have dealt with this. I realize the amount of read/writes required is quite high, but this application is far beyond your typical memory key or camera situation in terms of activity.

It isn't the BOOT time...

[jjeffrey]

My XP laptop boots in a time that seems pefectly fine to me, dosen't bother me at all.

What bothers me is the login time. The *worst* thing being that even when the desktop and taskbar appear, there is still another 30 seconds before the machine is usable.

This seems like a big usability problem to me - I don't think it should be there until it is ready, otherwise the user gets very frustrated trying to click on a button that just wont play while the hard drive continues to thrash around.

Also, I think that 30 seconds is a bit lond to load a profile...

Boot times

[ashground]

Actually, yesterday I took a stopwatch to my computers to compare their boot times (comparing my new PowerBook G4 1670 with 1gb of RAM and my old Athlon 1700+ desktop with 768mb of RAM).

Both computers are running a similar load of software at boot. The PC boots with Palm Desktop, Rainlender, and a web server (Abyss) while the Mac boots with Quicksilver and a web server (Apache). Other than that, everything else is pretty standard--audio drivers, video drivers, tablet drivers, and so on. Most of these things are present on both computers. The Mac is a month or two old, the PC hasn't been formatted in two years or so.

Everything timed at home with a stopwatch.

First up--the amount of time it takes from pushing the power button until you have a usable login screen.
Mac--139 seconds
PC--38 seconds

Next--the amount of time it takes from entering your password until you have an idle workspace (on Windows, this was when things stopped loading in the system tray, on OSX this was when the Finder menu appeared completely).
Mac--50 seconds
PC--9 seconds

So, complete boot time (plus whatever time it takes to enter a username and/or password)...
Mac--189 seconds
PC--47 seconds

Finally--the amount of time from the time you click "shutdown" until your computer is powered off.
Mac--53 seconds
PC--11 seconds

So, the time it takes to do a complete reboot...
Mac--242 seconds
PC--58 seconds

Instant-on would be fantastic if it could recover from crashes. There's nothing more frustrating than waiting three minutes for my laptop to boot.

Re:Boot times

[amadeusb4]

To reduce boot, login and shutdown times, upgrade to Tiger (10.4). Here are times for mine(PB G4 with 768MB running 10.4.0):

• boot to login = 29 sec.
• login = ~25 sec (extended by startup items like iCal and stickies)
• shutdown = 11 sec

These numbers are a huge improvement to 10.3.9 running on my cube but then again the cube is nearly 5 years old.

Regarding the non-volatile booting, I would like to point out that my C-64 was already doing that.

Re:Boot times

[nick this]

Yes... osx boot times completely suck. That's why I only reboot after updates.

Time from opening lid of powerboot to idle desktop: 2-3 sec.
Time from closing lid of powerbook to glowing white "sleep" light: 4-5 seconds, but doesn't much matter.

I wouldn't want to be called an apologist or anything, but my laptop seems *way* faster to me than my xp box, just because my pb is essentially instant-on, what with the quick sleep times. It is annoying when you have to do a full boot though. Although 10.4 is some better in this regard than 10.3. Guess it's dictated by usage. Perhaps they spent time optimizing sleep times, not boot times, in that they expected people to sleep more often. Dunno.

Re:Boot times

[prockcore]

That's why I only reboot after updates.

I'm even worse. I tend to leave the Software Update "The new software requires your computer to reboot now" window sitting in background for days. Sometimes it stays open until Apple releases a new update that also need a reboot.

It's also the biggest reason I hate Safari... a browser update shouldn't require a reboot. WebKit shouldn't be that tied to the OS.

Re:Boot times

[TimmyDee]

I'm sorry, I realize this is a non-scientific comparison, but this is anything but scientific. You're comparing a laptop, which likely has a 5400 rpm drive, to a desktop, which likely has a 7200 rpm drive. One of the major limiting factors at bootup is the disk. With so much seeking and reading going on, a difference in disk speed will be a huge hit to the laptop -- any laptop.

Also, comparing Mac OS X 10.3 to XP SP2 (as you failed to note in your original post) is also a bit bunk. Apple completely rewrote the boot sequence for 10.4 and, as a result, has dramatically decreased boot time.

Oh, and one more thing, you PowerBook has more memory. Memory tests happen at startup. The extra 256 MB of RAM may add a few seconds to the boot sequence.

I admit I'm an Apple fan, but we need to have a level playing field if we're going to compare these things.

Re:Boot times

[aleander]

If it's anything similiar to Linux or Windows, then WebKit does not need to be tied to the OS. AFAIR it's a library and there can be more than one application running that uses it. If there's an e.g. security problem, then it is essential to replace all running instances of it with the new version, and rebooting the computer is the simpliest way of assuring this.

Re:I wonder if this is MRAM

[I kan Spl]

Relpying to my own comment here, and having RTFA...

Wow. This *IS* MRAM.
From the MRAM site:

MRAM is a memory (RAM) technology that uses electron spin to store information. MRAM has been called "the ideal memory" - potentially combining the density of DRAM with the speed of SRAM and non-volatility of FLASH memory or hard disk, and all this while consuming a very low amount of power. MRAM can resist high radiation, and can operate in extreme temperature conditions. It is likely that we'll see the first MRAM in applications that need such properties.


MRAM is being researched by the SSRC at UCSC. From my understanding of what they are doing they are using the non-volatile MRAM as sort of a L3 cache between the RAM and the processor. This stuff is wicked fast, so the response time from RAM to the processor is taken down something like an order of magnitude. If the OS could prefetch things from RAM to MRAM in some intelligent way they could get the system memory access time down, and speed up things overall that use lots of memory accesses.... things like Booting, and opening Acrobat....

This could be quite neet if they release it....

GO SLUGS!

Re:The big secret...

[chavo valdez]

No you're just plain wrong.
Windows boots faster and gets to a usable desktop faster than Linux. Period.
I use both Linux and Windows, mostly Linux though. Windows plain boots quicker.
I wish it weren't true, but unfortunately it is. There is some work being done to speed things up, loading services in parallel instead of one after another. I believe Suse is the first major distro to implement this. I have Suse installed for testing and it boots much quicker than my normal distro kubuntu.

Once again, I'm most definitely not a Windows fanboy, I'm just stating the facts.

and paging won't help

[twitter]

If this kind if thing is a concern, you're booting too often.

And "quick boot" won't help. The reason you are booting too often is because the OS you use is buggy and unstable, probably the one with an "insane" goal of 30 days uptime that currently has to be booted daily.

You also suffer from a single screen GUI, so you can't easily work on more than one thing at a time.

My laptop six year old laptop stays up longer than that. I take it down to get around buggy bios which sometimes won't work the vga out when I need to give a presentation. It goes to sleep when I close the lid and it wakes up when I open it, sometimes days later. My work is where I left it, on one of eighteen Enlightenment virtual desktops.

What's Intel got to match what I've already got? A copy of XP in the BIOS? No thanks, Intel, you can keep the next generation of boot pain to yourself.

Dual Boots

[whogben]

I think this could be most interesting with regard to dual boots - especially with regard to Mactels with Windows onboard. You can switch operating systems without rebooting, or without going through all the loading and calculation involved with rebooting. Virtual PC has a "Save PC state on shutdown" option which already does this. When you quit virtual PC, everything its doing is simply stored, and recalled very fast when you reopen this. Implementing this for x operating systems on your Mactel can't be impossible. Each OS stores itself and then restores the one you want before terminating itself - you could switch from Linux to OS-X to XP in as little as 20 seconds each change!

Re:What do you mean, "one can dream"?

[jellomizer]

I don't know why Intel is working so hard to try to make Microsoft look good. Improvements to hardware can't fix shitty software.

Because when Microsoft looks good Intel Looks good. Most people do not know the difference between the OS and the hardware. When the OS is slow they get new hardware, figuring their computer is just old and slow. While in the short term this may sound good but what will probably happen people will be frustrated with the intel system (Figuring it is a peace of junk) and Go with AMD or what ever else. And by chance they may go with a PC manufacture that doesn't pre-load the computer crap so they get a computer that seems extremely fast so people my not go with Intel again.

Windows is even more embarassingly beaten when you compare OS X Server with Windows 2000 or 2003 Server. Those fuckers take FOREVER to reboot.
This again may point to the hardware. A lot of time when I see a window server boot a bulk of the time is before it gets to the OS Level it is just probing for SCSI devices or doing a detailed check on all the ram (The issues TFA is saying it improved) If you want to see slow take a look at a Sun Enterprise system, they can take 5 minutes before they show you anything on the screen. The reason for this slowness is the fact that because these systems should go down often they need a full check on the hardware to make sure nothing is wrong after month/years of uptime.
Also the issue with Windows vs. OSX Server is that Windows can run on Any Box so it needs to check for as many possibilities as possible. While OSX knows what to do when it asks for the hardware configuration and the hardware responds XServe G5 32gb RAM. You can fault windows on a lot of thing, But I give them credit for being able to run on all the crap it does.

IME, OS X boot times beat the living shit out of Windows boot times. I've seen years-old, sub-1GHz G4s boot faster than home-built (i.e. lacking all the extra, cycle-eating horseshit programs that hobble your average Dell or HP PC) 2.0+GHz Wintel boxes with fresh installs of XP.
I don't know I have seen XP having a rather snappy boot up time, it is about on par with OS X. The only real difference is XP tends to still boot after the start button appears, allowing you to access the interface. While OS X takes a little longer in the Splash screen.

Re:What do you mean, "one can dream"?

[NutscrapeSucks]

I don't know why Intel is working so hard to try to make Microsoft look good. Improvements to hardware can't fix shitty software.

When Windows 2000 came out, Intel owners were immediately blessed with a conflict-free APIC controller. Meanwhile AMD users were punching their nuts over the "IRQ 9 syndrome". That sort of thing makes Intel look good.

> faster than home-built (i.e. lacking all the extra, cycle-eating horseshit programs that hobble your average Dell or HP PC)

There's 0 evidence that Dell/HP boots slower than home-built. If anything their bios flips through much faster than generic.

Re:It's about time!

[DDLKermit007]

If your fastest machine takes longer than 30-60 seconds to boot you need to either get some better hardware or hand in your geek card. Most machines I build anymore takes less than 60 seconds to boot anymore. Only thing that ever slows down the boot time is extra controler cards that have to get information like drive sizes on boot.

Re:The big secret...

[NutscrapeSucks]

That's only one of the many things that Windows does to boot quicker. There's even a background deamon that optimizes drive layout for quick booting during idle times.

It's pure sour grapes. An XP desktop is not hindered because something is starting in the background. Linux doesn't do this stuff because the people who put money into development are looking at the server market.

My Two Cents on the Whole Faster Boot Dealie.

[Hina Matsuri]

My Gentoo Box boots in 13 seconds. Maybe 5 seconds to fluxbox, including loging in and "startx". Not a big deal, and I restart a whole once or twice a week. But that's because I'm moving hard disks around and only have one firewire case. When I do restart, I don't want to have remnants from last time, I want to start over. I thought that was the point of restarting. I for one am not going to rush out to buy anything to cut ten seconds off my boot time anytime soon. My two cents, flame me or mod me down for being a dumbass, I don't particularly care. Oh, and I didn't bother to RTFA. Bite me.

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice / 2G / 1.8T over 8 disks... mostly anime. :)

To the OP - misunderstanding cameras, Doh! etc.

[new500]

You complain about the zoom extending. Uhu, have you looked at compact multi-element zoom designs? 12 or more elements, many or even most of which geared independantly is not uncommon. The longer the zoom - comsumer guys want optical 10 times zooms, which would be unheard of in a professional lens for many other considerations (predominantly aperture speed and distortion characteristics) and that means even more complicated designs, even allowing small lenses are easier and simpler to design. Now try shifting all those elements _accurately_ with a tiny low voltage low torque servo (see why it's low torque here - too fe2w turns possible in such a small space to get a focus throw long enough to try to do this quickly and accurately and repeatably*). This is why my piezo-wave-effect ring-motor driven Nikkor zoom is several times more expensive of itself than almost any digicam.

Got the idea?

To the above poster - i sure hope there's not much calibration going on when i boot my Nikon. Unless it's to compensate for working temperature effects, if i've spent time and effort having a lens tuned to how i like it (yes this doesn't just happen, it's common) i want it to be left alone at that spec. Now that even modest digicams such as the Fuji F10/11 boot instantly and respond extremely quickly, there's simply no excuse for slow electronics and (electronic) shutter save at the real budget segment.

* even some (sadly many) professional photogs insist on continuing the myth that because the lens / sensor is small, everything remains sharp because the DOF (depth of field) is greater in those conditions. Er, DOF is a psychological effect which is a function of the print enlargement factor, print size, viewing distance and airy dic resolving limit - so the assumption is not true at equivalent apertures, hence the need even in very small "format" cameras to _still_ focus accurately, in OP's case, sadly, slowly too. The effect observed is anecdotally true however at small print sizes like 6" by 4".

Re:To the OP - misunderstanding cameras, Doh! etc.

[AuMatar]

Having worked in firmware, I'm sure there is. While I haven't done cameras, I have done scanners. Light levels, color levels, gain, dc bias, etc. All of those things need to be calibrated on the fly, and recalibrated occasionally. Temperature effects on the circuit boards caused problems on some of my projects. I'd be surprised if 2/3 of the startup time wasn't necessary cal.

Re:To the OP - misunderstanding cameras, Doh! etc.

[new500]

I'll give you circuit cal. In particular i mentioned temperature calibration (a real issue for many photographics situations) But not in the way i specifically mentioned, which certainly wasn't a generic comment. "Light levels, color levels, gain, dc bias, etc" Of the first two on the list how on earth do you calibrate without reference sources? When i switch on my cam, it has a lens cap on and shutter closed, so that i guess allows the CD to reference a dark frame. However when i calibrate a (handheld) light meter, it's a process needing a reliable light source. Colorimeters/ spectros are beyond my capability to calibrate. But then i am talking reference calibration and you are i think talking about operating calibration. My point was, in this thread, and the context of the OP comment, that other factors outweigh calibration in terms of slowness in use. I am pretty sure that the tolerance of consumer users in photography to variations in output quality is vastly greater than minute variations in calibration. Thus i posit, toungue in cheek, that i wouldn't be surprised if 2/3 of the startup time wan't necessary at all :)

I wasn't arguing against your point, just suggesting alternatives as to why digicams can be slow to respond.

Re:Hibernate

[morzel]

IIRC, hibernate is a wee bit smarter than that nowadays. (At least this is the case on Windows, don't know about the mechanism that is used on Linux or MacOS X).

Instead of just dumping the contents of the whole RAM to disk, it will only deal with the part of RAM that is actually allocated (not the part that is used as HD cache). For the actual memory that has been allocated, everything that can be paged to swap will be paged to the swap file. Due to the swapping mechanism, a great deal of the memory in use is probably already in the swap file. All the other bits are stored in a hibernation file.

When booting, all that has to be done is dump the contents of the hibernation file to RAM (which is probably way smaller than the actual size of the RAM). From that point on, the OS starts running again and pages the stuff you actually need back out of swap (a much more gradual process than dumping back a snapshot of the full RAM contents).

Software suspend

[zmotula]

Isn't this (from the users' point of view) almost the same thing as software suspend? I reboot/power off my Mac only when a new security update comes out, the sleep/wake up is almost instant. On Windows or Linux the software suspend is not as quick, but seems fast enough for me.

Maybe some server machines could make use of the quick boot... but then again, the article says the machine does the starting procedure in advance, before it shuts down, so that there are no savings in the reboot/start again cycle--just the majority of the work is shifted to the "shutdown" phase?

Re:What do you mean, "one can dream"?

[NMerriam]

you'd risk losing one of the prime reasons to use x86: compatibility. hell, motherboards still come with floppy connectors. why? because some ancient or niche programs still require a floppy to use. winxp still only accepts drivers for hd's on a floppy only.

Compatability is an illusion -- you can't install WinXP on a 16-bit processor, much less an 8-bit one. So why are the hardware limitations of XP systems still being driven by compatibility with 8-bit processors?

You actually point out a key difference in why the boot time is so screwed up on the PC. An ancient floppy connector and controller on the motherboard? Why? You can buy a $29.99 USB floppy drive and it will work perfectly on any modern PC motherboard. That technology is 10 years old. I mean, if you really want a 720k floppy drive hooked up, there's nothing in the MacOS hardware or software architecture that will stop you, Apple just recognizes that it's a waste of time to devote any of their own engineering effort or motherboard space to an obsolete technology. But if you install Darwin on an i386 system, it will quite happily find your 1987-era floppy and boot from it.

and frankly, the bios or initialization hardware shouldn't be doing much more than just probing the hardware and passing control to an OS

That's exactly what the Mac does, and exactly what the PC doesn't do. The PC hardware is still based around the 1980s notion that you would have certain predictable and limited peices of hardware that meet certain outdated specifications and the BIOS would control them all. We've been building workarounds for that assumption and it's arbitrary limitations (640k of memory? Boot past a certain cylinder on the hard drive?) ever since.

Re:It's about time!

[ozmanjusri]

Getting off topic, but any recommendations for good comparisons between Linux and OS X?

Yes. Just Google "flamewar".

That's not really offtopic

[Slashcrap]

Yes but does it work with Linux?

After all, we have only a vague idea of how this thing works. It could well require some kind of OS support.

Now obviously we don't know the answer to that until Intel decides to squirt out another press release at some point in the future. But in the mean time there may be some people on Slashdot who have some specialist knowledge of this type of thing. Maybe they will join the discussion and provide some insightful opinions or even some informative answers.

Read carrefully before pressing accept.

[leuk_he]

No we did not implement booting puppy linux from a flash disk. That has never been done before. Especially it is untested from a intel motherboard.

Also we never invented "On-Now" for windows 98.

-- ministry of disinformation.

About time we got back to the mid nineties.

[Goth Biker Babe]

Up to about 1996 my regular computer was one that booted virtually instantaniously. It's just that it didn't run Windows, Mac OS or Linux. RISC OS (as mentioned on Slashdot a few days ago) was/is in ROM/FLASH and was there the moment the machine started. I held off moving over to a PC/Linux basically because of boot times. Admittedly with linux you just leave the machine on so it's not an issue but Windows was/is a real pain.

Yaawwnn

[Stumbles]

Well LinuxBIOS has been getting boot up times in the 3 second range for a while. Nothing new move on. http://www.linuxbios.org/index.php/Main_Page

Only from Intel!

[trintron]

When your computer crashes, we enable you to boot almost immediately. It's so fast, it's almost like no crashing at all!

With Intel Inside, you can.

Lifetime shouldn't be an issue, in practice

[mbessey]

If you figure that the Flash will survive up to 100,000 write cycles, then if you rewrite it ten times a day, it'll last 27 years. I doubt your boot configuration will change that often. And 100,000 cycles is a lot lower than the "rated" lifetime of modern Flash, not to mention that the "actual" lifetime can be a lot longer with appropriate load-leveling and error recovery.

Huh...

[RoffleTheWaffle]

Placing a memory image on flash that can be loaded directly into RAM? Who knew? Didn't the Amiga do something like this with the Kickstart Chip, only it was ROM?

None the less, it's still a pretty neat concept, not to mention one that's been rather neglected. I wonder if this will become a big deal in the future. I hope it catches on with desktops soon, since this kind of thing could have a lot more applications than just fast loads. Moreover, I hope that software becomes available that could allow this to be done with existing flash devices. That'd be pretty nice, what with IDE flash registers and USB flash crud being available and all.