What exactly do you mean by "real time"? The definition tends to be a bit
different for some people. Usually it means capable of deterministic
behavior to a millisecond or microsecond level. CE itself has been capable
of "real time" behavior since 3.0, and with 4.x it's deterministic behavior
is even better, but none of it has to do with the system clock.
The system clock in CE is often set to have 1 second intervals. The system
tick, however, defaults to 1ms (it can be altered in the OAL if it's
*really* necessary). Beyond that, most processors today have a clock *much*
faster than that, and is sometimes queryable through
QueryPerformanceCounter. That said, none of these have anything to do with
real time systems or deterministic behavior. If you need something to occur
within 500 us of an interrupt and the system can achieve that, the clock
could tick once an hour and it has no relevance to the real-time behavior.
All that said, if you're needing a real-time system, managed code is *not*
something you should even consider. The inherent unpredictability of
garbage collection means you can never have deterministic behavior (unless
your requirements are *really* liberal).
-Chris
The system clock will often have enough drift due to the crystal and
temperature to make it unreliable as a sub-second timer
