provides improved efficiency, since the CPU does not need to waste cycles to make up for the low resolution of timers, and enables more aggressive use of sleep states, reducing power consumption. In addition to the application-level demand for high-precision clock, there are OS-level benefits in the scheduler and through the availability of a stable clock base for multi-processor systems. Comparison to predecessors HPET is meant to supplement and replace the 8254 programmable interval timer and the RTC's periodic interrupt function. Compared to these older timer circuits, the HPET has higher frequency and wider 64-bit counters (although they can be driven in 32-bit mode). The HPET specification does not define the timer frequency, only requiring a minimum of 10 MHz; the actual frequency is provided to the operating system by a hardware register giving the number of femtoseconds per period (with an upper bound of ). A popular value is 14.3 MHz, 12 times the standard 8254 frequency of 1.193 MHz. While 8254 and RTC can be put into an HPET-like one-shot mode, the set-up process is so slow that their one-shot mode is not used in practice for tasks requiring precise scheduling. Instead, 8254 and RTC are typically used in periodic mode with a very small time interval. For example, if an application needs to perform several short (some milliseconds, perhaps) waits, it is better to have a periodic timer running constantly with a 1 ms period because of the high setup cost of an 8254 or RTC one-shot timer. This causes an interrupt at every millisecond even if the application needs to do actual work less frequently. With HPET, the extra interrupts can be avoided, because the set-up cost of a HPET one-shot timer is considerably smaller. Use and compatibility Operating systems designed before HPET existed cannot use HPET, so they use other timer facilities. Newer operating systems tend to be able to use either. Some hardware has both. Indeed, most current southbridge chips have legacy-supporting instances of PIT, PIC, Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC) and RTC devices incorporated into their silicon whether or not they are used by the operating system, which helps very modern PCs run older operating systems. The following operating systems are known not to be able to use HPET: Windows XP SP1, and earlier Windows versions, Linux kernels prior to 2.6. The following operating systems are known to be able to use HPET: