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Microsoft touts application caching to boost Windows 8 battery life
SOFTWARE REDEVELOPER Microsoft said it will suspend Windows 8 applications that do not appear on screen in its Metro interface to increase power efficiency.
Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 operating system will need to work on providing good battery life, as many system builders intend to put the heavyweight operating system on tablets. To help matters, Microsoft claimed its goal is to make Windows 8 Metro applications that are not visible on screen not use any battery power.
According to Microsoft, Windows 8 will bring improvements to background code execution, which Microsoft claims will minimise impact on battery life while maintaining multitasking. Microsoft has created new application programming interfaces for background processing, which the firm claims will be able to provide the multi-tasking abilities that users expect but minimise battery drain.
The firm also said its goal is getting the processor into lower power states as much as possible, meaning suspended applications will be stored in a cached state.
Microsoft claims switching to a suspended application will be instant, with the state preserved from last use. However not all applications will be cached in main memory due to space constraints, with Windows 8's memory manager opting to stick infrequently accessed applications back onto disk, which in the case of tablets is likely to be solid-state storage rather than a mechanical hard drive.
Now all Microsoft needs is for device manufacturers to make tablets that perform well compared to Apple's Ipad and the many Android devices, otherwise all its work could be in vain. µ
Tags: Microsoft
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What you're describing sounds pretty much like 'standard' pre-emptive multitasking to me, which is how most OS's work these days.
MS seem to be suggesting that they'll be paging application processes that aren't visible on screen out to non-volatile memory, which is pretty much like swapping them out to VMem.
So like I was wondering; how do you improve process execution by preventing processes from executing?
Perhaps all they're really saying is that they've finally come up with a Virtual memory system that's actually usable i.e. one that doesn't rely upon going through the filesystem.
From what I've seen (which I'll admit may have changed, or may have been misinterpreted)...
Instead of letting every app run background processes whenever they want, WinRT applications will need to register background tasks, and instead each app spinning up a thread or process for each task, the OS will instead work through all pending background tasks with its own thread/process.
This means that if you had 10 apps suspended, all of which trying to perform background tasks at the same time, in reality, only one or two of these tasks may run at a time.
Repeat, this is just what I've seen/heard/interpreted.
Snese: Something that, which at first glance seems to make sense but which, when further examined doesn't make any sense at all.
The idea of "improving" background code execution by suspending it seems like an oxymoron to me; how does this maintain multi-tasking if only the apps that appear on screen are actually running?