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New Phoenix BIOS Starts Windows 7 Boot In 1 Second

Posted by timothy on from the nice-start dept.

suraj.sun excerpts from a tantalizing Engadget post: "Phoenix is showing off a few interesting things at IDF, but the real standout is their new Instant Boot BIOS [video here], a highly optimized UEFI implementation that can start loading an OS in just under a second. Combined with Windows 7's optimized startup procedure, that means you're looking at incredibly short boot times — we saw a retrofitted Dell Adamo hit the Windows desktop in 20 seconds, while a Lenovo T400s with a fast SSD got there in under 10."

7 of 437 comments (clear)

  1. BIOS by sopssa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That is indeed really fast boot to desktop. I like it how it shows the Windows loading screen almost immediatly too.

    This also brings a new friend for F5 hitting. To get to the bios menu you'll be smashing F12 as fast as you can during boot.

    But the article is a little low on details of optimizations. As I've understood, BIOS isn't really that complicated nor does it do any heavy calculations. It basically just brings hardware up and tests it, which takes most of the time (not that the 5-6 seconds is so long wait anyway). So have they optimized something else, or are they just skipping those tests?

    1. Re:BIOS by __aamnbm3774 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Computers are lightning fast compare to a few years ago, there should be no need to 'poll hardware, wait 3 seconds, test next piece of hardware'.

      If properly parallelized and you remove all the pointless Waits, a BIOS check should be damn-near close to immediate and still manage to check everything.

      BIOS writers probably figured, eh, so what if it takes 10 seconds or so, thats still pretty quick, and never rewrote their crappy legacy code.

    2. Re:BIOS by TheLink · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Actually you'd think most people would want servers that are infrequently rebooted to come back up really fast.

      But yeah, you can't spin up that many drives at once. I've heard a server where the drives were making up and down "pitch" changes during boot up... Not good :).

      --
    3. Re:BIOS by pjr.cc · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Actually, how often it boots and fast it boots are often small considerations - depending on where you sit.

      Consider a file server that crashes and reboots twice a year and takes 5 minutes to come back up... thats 99.998% availability and from an infrastructure perspective thats pretty dang awesome.
      From a helpdesk point of view, they'll suffer one heck of a beeting everytime it goes down and that'll be all they remember of the server.
      Same goes for the users, all they'll remember is the 5 minutes it went down when half the company was doing something important.

      Consider active directory though (or any kind of multi-master replicated service) - again, your talking about a server thats really not doing anything terribly difficult, but unlike the file server if it goes down no ones likely to notice. On top of that your often more concerned that the server will come up working then how quickly.

      As for noise, well the good ol e450 from sun fully stacked with 20 15k disks (not to mention its in-built fans) used to make very amusing noises as it came up and some of the time it went down was because the disks managed to disconnect from the backplane (and you could hear the difference if you were around it during a boot often enough) - a good hard whack and it was sorted. Wondefull little machines those

  2. It will also "start to boot" Linux in 1 Second! by AftanGustur · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Great BIOS!

    But there is no special relationship between this bios and Windows 7, meaning that Linux can't also start-to-boot in 1 second!

    The Upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 is going to start up in 10 seconds, meaning that from you hit the power button until you have the system ready are only 11 seconds on this system.

    --
    echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
  3. Combine it with Moblin by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Intel's Moblin boots incredibly fast. Their early prototypes got to desktop in 5 seconds. Here's a video of Moblin 2.0, possibly taking a bit longer than that but it's also probably a nicer desktop ;-)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqmuPFZ1RWo

    Moblin's aim, AFAIK, is to get you to a full *usable* desktop as quickly as possible. So unlike what Windows (unless they've improved this since XP, when I last checked!) and some Linux distros do you don't get your quickly loaded desktop bogged down by loads of services starting in the background. You get there, you're done (although you may still have to wait for the network to connect but whatever you do won't be wallowing whilst other stuff loads).

  4. Re:moderation goof by EdZ · · Score: 3, Interesting

    After running Windows 7 for a while, one of my favourite things has been not needing to restart for installing updates. I've gone weeks on Vista with the "please restart to complete updating" message popping up periodically because it's just too much hassle to note down everything I have open and arranged, pause or cancel any running operations (if possible), then restart everything afterwards. This can take a good half an hour start to finish, which usually gets traded for half an hour of doing something useful. Hopefully, this should at least mean more people will keep Windows 7 up to date, even if it's just that average users will never even notice the automatic update process and thus never get annoyed and turn it off.