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How is that a SP3 boots up considerably faster than an ipad air 2?

kiwigirl

Member
Both are flash drives, except the SP has a full OS (so it should be much more ram intensive than ios). Ipads, Ive never understand why it takes a good 1.5-2mins to cold boot (thats why most people rarely, if at all turn theirs completely off). Whereas the SP3, with mine I shut mine off every night cause it boots in like 5 or 6 secs.
 

RémiM

Active Member
The booting time has almost always increased which each new generation of iPad, except for the iPad Air and Mini 2. I guess it's a combination of software and hardware that makes the iPad very slow to turn on and off.

The A7X proc seems to be much better than older procs (cf iPad Air and iPad Mini 2 fast booting time)
:

 

Moonsurface

Super Moderator
Staff member
I'm impressed with it too, my Nexus phone used to take forever to boot Android Jellybean, and I'm pretty sure my windows phone takes longer than the surface too (though not anywhere near as long as the Android).
 

wditters

Active Member
The two cannot be compared. Windows 8 is a full fledged operating system with sophisticated 64-bit dual-cpu hyperthreading capabilities, parallel tasking, delayed startup of non-key processes and services. iOS doesn't even come close in that respect. You can already start using Windows while it is still loading up the remainder of the OS in the background. Second item is that the fact that they both use flash doesn't guarantee that the type of flash memory is equally fast. In fact, an iPad uses much slower flash type memory than a modern day PC with sata-6 or pci-e type flash. I think these two aspects alone already make the difference.

And please don't forget, the iPad is a tablet. The SP3 is a full core-i PC. Even if they share part of the same (tablet-type) functionality, they are different beasts altogether,
 

GreyFox7

Super Moderator
Staff member
The two cannot be compared. Windows 8 is a full fledged operating system with sophisticated 64-bit dual-cpu hyperthreading capabilities, parallel tasking, delayed startup of non-key processes and services. iOS doesn't even come close in that respect. You can already start using Windows while it is still loading up the remainder of the OS in the background. Second item is that the fact that they both use flash doesn't guarantee that the type of flash memory is equally fast. In fact, an iPad uses much slower flash type memory than a modern day PC with sata-6 or pci-e type flash. I think these two aspects alone already make the difference.

And please don't forget, the iPad is a tablet. The SP3 is a full core-i PC. Even if they share part of the same (tablet-type) functionality, they are different beasts altogether,
well actually I've been told many times that iOS is just a fruit colored version of BSD Unix with some of the capabilities turned off. If it's slow Apple tuned it wrong unless holding it differently speeds it up. :cool:
 

jnjroach

Administrator
Staff member
While OSX and iOS do have BSD underpinnings it uses the MACH Kernel (used by NEXT OS) not the traditional BSD UNIX Kernel.
 

GreyFox7

Super Moderator
Staff member
While OSX and iOS do have BSD underpinnings it uses the MACH Kernel (used by NEXT OS) not the traditional BSD UNIX Kernel.
I thought I covered that with *fruit colored* ;)

It all depends on the argument though :) if you complain about multitasking its fully multitasking... except you can only run one at a time... you know how it goes... :)

Once you start modifying something and then you build something else on top of it reenabling features is not just as simple as toggling a Boolean, adding an include and recompiling since none of the rest of the system was written to use or support that feature.
 

GoodBytes

Well-Known Member
They are several reasons on why the Surface Pro 1, 2, 3 (and many other systems) can boot Windows 8 so quickly
-> System Performance. The CPU and memory of the Surface Pro 3 (and 2 and 1 and many other systems, but I'll mention 3, as this is what is being talked about here) is far more powerful than the iPad. ARM architecture, which is what the Apple iPad is based on, is designed for low power consumption, not high performance. Yes, it is incredible how companies are able to push the architecture in providing great performance, same with Intel how it is able to take its own current x86 architecture and make it so power efficient.

-> Storage speed. SSDs vary in speed greatly. Doesn't mean that the system has an SSD that the system is automatically faster than age old floppy drive, if you know what those are. I have experience systems with so called "SSDs" inside, which made me wonder if its not a 5400RPM HDD inside instead, despite the fast CPU (Core i5 series), and decent amount of memory. Some manufactures for some models (low end) tend to follow a check list: "People want to see 128GB SSD.. ok lets put a 128GB SSD, but the slowest one money can buy as we need to keep the price low, and that will boost sales over the competitor, check!... ", and can do it for other hardware as well.

-> Microsoft talent. Say what you will, Microsoft has very talented and skilled people. That is a fact. They know how to optimize things, and continuously do research on how to make things better. Sometimes the improvement isn't as big or visible due that it is being offseted by newer features, but it is there.

-> Modern Windows systems uses UEFI technology, and Windows 8 fully supports it, allowing to make the OS boot faster. I am not sure what Apple iPad uses, and if it does indeed uses UEFI, to what extend.

-> Windows 8 uses hybrid boot. It hibernates part of the OS when you shutdown (part that doesn't really change, or isn't expected to change at any moment), making it boot quicker. Pretty smart trick.
 
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Sven

Member
Flash ram on a SoC application is NOT an SSD.

It's a fundamentally different design.

I don't think the iPad flash would manage a 5th of the sustained or random r/w and io operations of a modern PC, OSX included.
 

kevinlevrone

Active Member
Ask yourself this question: how many times did you have to reboot your iPad versus your SP3 in the last month ? The iPad boot-up time is irrelevant since you are never rebooting it except on system upgrades.
 

InspectHerGadget

Active Member
I agree boot up time is of academic interest only. The hardware in the SP3 is a cut above the iPad which is a very low power mobile device, in terms of performance generally. It also weighs twice as much and is much bigger and with a shorter battery life.
 
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