The High Precision Event Timer is a hardware timer used in personal computers. It was developed jointly by Intel and Microsoft and has been incorporated in PC chipsets since circa 2005. Formerly referred to by Intel as a Multimedia Timer, the term HPET was selected to avoid confusion with the multimedia timers software feature introduced in the MultiMedia Extensions to Windows 3.0.
Older operating systems that do not support a hardware HPET device can only use older timing facilities, such as the programmable interval timer (PIT) or the real-time clock (RTC). Windows XP, when fitted with the latest HAL (hardware abstraction layer), can also use the processor's Time Stamp Counter (TSC) or Power Management Timer (PMTIMER), together with the RTC to provide operating system features that would, in later Windows versions, be provided by the HPET hardware. Confusingly, such XP systems quote "HPET" connectivity in the device driver manager even though the Intel HPET device is not being used.
Read more about High Precision Event Timer: Features, Applications, Comparison To Predecessors, Compatibility, Problems
Famous quotes containing the words high, precision and/or event:
“Parents do not give up their children to strangers lightly. They wait in uncertain anticipation for an expression of awareness and interest in their children that is as genuine as their own. They are subject to ambivalent feelings of trust and competitiveness toward a teacher their child loves and to feelings of resentment and anger when their child suffers at her hands. They place high hopes in their children and struggle with themselves to cope with their children’s failures.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“How should the world be luckier if this house,
Where passion and precision have been one
Time out of mind, became too ruinous
To breed the lidless eye that loves the sun?”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”
—Richard M. Nixon (b. 1913)