What Windows CE provides, then, is a small, yet feature-rich, operating system, which is causing a lot of buzz in the industry. .
What's New?.
The newer version of Windows CE improves on the real-time support of previous versions. "Developers now have total control over system scheduling with a wide range of features that help support the creation of real-time systems. Great real-time support in an operating system is necessary, but not sufficient for building a system that provides adequate real-time responsiveness- (Yao). Another important term is interrupting latency, the delay between a hardware interrupt and the start of the actual processing of the interrupt. "For some, this is a key benchmark since this sets a limit on the responsiveness of a device to outside events. A core goal for Windows CE 3.0 is to provide an interrupt latency response time of 50 ms on Windows CE running on a 166 MHz Pentium-(Herrera). .
Performance.
Windows CE is a multiprocessing and multithreaded operating system. "Unlike Windows NT and Windows 2000, Windows CE does not provide multiprocessor support- (Yao). Windows CE has been called a simple Operating System to use and perfect for the small handheld devices they have been used with. "This is actually good news, since it means that the Windows CE kernel is quite a bit simpler than the multiprocessor-ready Windows NT and Windows 2000 kernel- (Herrera). The downside to a simple kernel is that you cannot speed up the execution of a device running Windows CE by dropping in a new processor like you can with most desktop systems.
Another difference from desktop versions of Windows is that Windows CE limits users 32 simultaneously executing processes. "An important aspect of the Windows CE context switching mechanism is that a context switch was designed to be very fast- (Yao). This is due in part to the way that process address spaces are set up. Unlike Windows 2000, which gives each process its own set of page tables, all Windows CE processes share a single set of tables.