MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Why PalmSource May Be Right About Multitasking

TadW · 06-26-2005, 11:59 PM

Heading back to the multitasking/state-saving discussion. surur mentioned this a few posts before and he was very right: we are not any longer talking about Motorola Dragonball 33Mhz CPUs here. We are now talking about the 5th generation of the ARM microarchitecture - more precisely Intel's XScale processor, which includes support for superfast multitasking (i.e. context switching) and multimedia environments.

It seems some people still believe that multitasking apps are a waste of resources. Totally unwarranted, I may add. There is a shareware tool called Supertasks 2.0 for Pocket PCs which depicts CPU consumption of individual tasks, processes and even services. You'll see, if you try it, that even if you run ten applications at once, including an mp3 audioplayer and some Internet-based downloads, that with a standard XScale 416 MHz CPU, no process is using more than 4-5% total CPU.

So to all multitasking naysayers: what is the benefit of state-saving and giving a process 100% of available CPU resources if that process won't be using more than 4-5% of it?

06-26-2005, 11:59 PM	#26
TadW Uebermensch Posts: 2,583 Karma: 1094606 Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Italy Device: Kindle	Heading back to the multitasking/state-saving discussion. surur mentioned this a few posts before and he was very right: we are not any longer talking about Motorola Dragonball 33Mhz CPUs here. We are now talking about the 5th generation of the ARM microarchitecture - more precisely Intel's XScale processor, which includes support for superfast multitasking (i.e. context switching) and multimedia environments. It seems some people still believe that multitasking apps are a waste of resources. Totally unwarranted, I may add. There is a shareware tool called Supertasks 2.0 for Pocket PCs which depicts CPU consumption of individual tasks, processes and even services. You'll see, if you try it, that even if you run ten applications at once, including an mp3 audioplayer and some Internet-based downloads, that with a standard XScale 416 MHz CPU, no process is using more than 4-5% total CPU. So to all multitasking naysayers: what is the benefit of state-saving and giving a process 100% of available CPU resources if that process won't be using more than 4-5% of it?