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:
“A man shall perhaps rush by and trample down plants as high as his head, and cannot be said to know that they exist, though he may have cut many tons of them, littered his stables with them, and fed them to his cattle for years. Yet, if he ever favorably attends to them, he may be overcome by their beauty.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“This event advertises me that there is such a fact as death,—the possibility of a man’s dying. It seems as if no man had ever died in America before; for in order to die you must first have lived.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)