Re: Windows NT for real time application

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Alejandro Saez (cano++at++krusty.engr.sgi.com)
Mon, 11 Jan 1999 12:25:32 -0600


On Jan 9, 12:53am, Phil Yanni wrote:
> Subject: Windows NT for real time application
> et. al.,
> Having started on an SGI PI machine and then a VGX, I truly believed for a
> long time that you needed IRIX to do anything in realtime. Having said
> that, we currently are running flight control, Flight Management,
> Navigation management, and a Moving Map on a Lowly Pentium 166Mhz machine
> using "standard" NT.
>
> There are real time extensions and there is "Embedded NT", but we have
> never found the need for them.

Well, logic is sometimes tricky, saying "we have never found the need" does not
imply "we have found there is never the need", and this very subtle ordering is
an important technological difference. How big are terrain textures? ,What's
the frame rate? Are you droping any frames? If there is plenty of time to
execute all the tasks and send data across the sysytem in time, then of course
there is no need for real time extensions, but that forces you to have a system
big enough so there is always time left (a brute force sort of approach),
although a smaller system could be used if real time extensions were there to
better manage CPU time, and sometimes, get the thing working at all.

> NT is the future of realtime systems so we had best all get on the
> bandwagon or start looking for other jobs.

That depends on what your definition of future is, if it is just what's gonna
be selling big for then next years, then I agree that's pretty much the future
(at least for low to mid end systems). If we are talking in the same way as
having 1995 PC's doing the same stuff Macs were doing for years, then no I
don't call it future, I call it technological amnesia... don't forget we are
not talking about any technological breakthrough on absolute terms, is just
compared to what's being done on this platform. There is an economic incentive
to all this, but cutting edge technology (i.e. "the future") has never been a
domain of the PC, by definition.
>
> -Phil Yanni
> -ANZUS Inc
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>-- End of excerpt from Phil Yanni

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Alejandro Saez
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