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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'.
I hope this is real and not vapor-ware. I've been waiting for instant start for 20 years.
Would we get a Robson Crusoe?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
you're booting too often
God Fucking Damnit
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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.
Move along... there is no sig here.
Linux User: Boo...ting? Oh...that thing I had to do when I first plugged it in. Gotcha.
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.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
From TFA:
"Chipmaker demonstrates 'Robson' flash memory to boost laptop startup speeds."
Mystery solved.
(The message to be displayed when the cache gets corrupt...)
*dodges tomatoes*
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
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.
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.