New 2GHz touchscreen scope from Tek, June 6th

[rf-design]

Newer DSOs seem to have worse user interface performance than older ones and this carries over to other devices so I predict that touch screen performance will be horrible.  The same applies to desktop operating systems, calculators, and cars and has nothing to do with the hardware performance or power limitations.

The software industry propose to improve the productivity with a huge number of GUI libraries and kits and in the end the programmer spending 95% learning module signaling and interconnect sideeffects and ways to workaround instead to minimize the number of self generates modules and concepts which fits the GUI requirement. In the realtime user expectation case all this is going much worse. Reatime GUI is obvious only a minority domain explored only in avionics and military.

[Howardlong]

For the JIT part, I think that's something we all must accept. After all as variety of devices booms, JIT is inevitable. Most programs running on Windows are already JIT based, thanks to .NET. Almost 100% software running on Android is so, and some iOS software are JIT, while Apple is pushing the shift from native to JIT.
In many cases, if your program is not custom made algorithm intensive, JIT can be faster than native due to better optimized libraries and "free" 64-bit support.
Pre-caching is the technology supporting JIT. In many cases, especially for Android, when a JIT program first runs, OS does a thorough AOT compilation to accelerate successive loading. .NET offers similar feature, but not automatically to user programs (or the evil WinSXS will be much larger).

The experience I've gleaned with JIT over the past couple of decades is that the touted benefits are very rarely if ever in evidence, whereas the downsides, in particular slow startup, most definitely are. .NET is possibly the worst offender I've experienced, but Java's not great either. We did a demo of a real case distributed system at Barcleona TechEd about 15 years ago at the birth of .NET, we had to pre-load everything before we took to the stage as it took ten minutes for the splash screen to appear, hardly great for a live auditorium demo! In real life practical deployments, I wrote a number of hacks to override the GAC by overwriting the cache to stop it recompiling at the drop of a hat. More recently you've been able to precompile to avoid JIT altogether, there's a reason they added that feature!

A further problem of JIT, whether dynamic or adaptive, is the validity of what's compiled. If the optimiser changes, or, in the case of adaptive compilation, the code is compiled with an unrepresentative dataset, it is quite possible that the resulting code is wrong, so you may see in edge cases dramatic non-deterministic slow downs for no apparent reason. I called them edge cases, but that doesn't mean it's rare. I would much rather have consistent and deterministic object code that I reproduce problems with and correct easily than a quicksand stew where I can't.

IMHO particularly in dedicated embedded systems, I just don't see any justification for JIT, it's a completely unnecessary technology, adding no value. It's not like the CPU fairies come around in the middle of the night and switch out the CPU on you.

[Jwalling]

Here's my illustration for what the new scope will look like:

Just came across this one on eBay.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Oscilloscope-7-discrete-channels-screens-/272667918115?hash=item3f7c463f23:g:0CYAAOSwol5Y2ve9

Pretty close... 

[Fungus]

Just came across this one on eBay.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Oscilloscope-7-discrete-channels-screens-/272667918115?hash=item3f7c463f23:g:0CYAAOSwol5Y2ve9

Awesome!

I'd definitely have one of those for my mad scientist film set (if I had one).

[nctnico]

Just came across this one on eBay.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Oscilloscope-7-discrete-channels-screens-/272667918115?hash=item3f7c463f23:g:0CYAAOSwol5Y2ve9

Awesome!

I'd definitely have one of those for my mad scientist film set (if I had one).

It would be cool to have text or pictures scroll through those 7 scopes in a row. Or make a readout for a frequecy counter with one digit per display.

[David Hess]

KS MSOX/DSOX scopes are very fast in terms of responsiveness. Tek is, on the other hand, very slow.
I have both their mid-high level scopes, a DPO5024 and an MSOX6004A. When it comes to user experience, there is just no comparison. I also use a DPO2024B a lot due to its small size and low value, so I use them in HV environments, cannibalized in HV test equipment we made in house. It is slightly faster than its bigger brother due to simpler function and less memory, but still very slow.

That was my experience when evaluating the Tektronix MSO5000 series.  How can the interface be so slow when it has a Core2 Quad processor?  Well, they managed it although I am sure it was pretty easy to do with Microsoft Windows as the operating system.

[nctnico]

KS MSOX/DSOX scopes are very fast in terms of responsiveness. Tek is, on the other hand, very slow.
I have both their mid-high level scopes, a DPO5024 and an MSOX6004A. When it comes to user experience, there is just no comparison. I also use a DPO2024B a lot due to its small size and low value, so I use them in HV environments, cannibalized in HV test equipment we made in house. It is slightly faster than its bigger brother due to simpler function and less memory, but still very slow.

That was my experience when evaluating the Tektronix MSO5000 series.  How can the interface be so slow when it has a Core2 Quad processor?  Well, they managed it although I am sure it was pretty easy to do with Microsoft Windows as the operating system.

That is a case of poor programming skills but it is absolutely not representative for non-Tektronix test equipment or related to Windows. I think for some reason the software developers at Tektronix don't want to load the CPU for 100% to avoid problems??? The software for the Tektronix TLA7xxx series is also very slow. It doesn't matter if you run it on a 133MHz Pentium1 or a quad core 4GHz Xeon. It is slow by design.

[madires]

Some companies cling on their old and obsolete UI frameworks while trying to add new features the original UI was never designed for. There are tons of UI frameworks, also open source ones, to choose from.

[BrianH_Tektronix]

KS MSOX/DSOX scopes are very fast in terms of responsiveness. Tek is, on the other hand, very slow.
I have both their mid-high level scopes, a DPO5024 and an MSOX6004A. When it comes to user experience, there is just no comparison. I also use a DPO2024B a lot due to its small size and low value, so I use them in HV environments, cannibalized in HV test equipment we made in house. It is slightly faster than its bigger brother due to simpler function and less memory, but still very slow.

That was my experience when evaluating the Tektronix MSO5000 series.  How can the interface be so slow when it has a Core2 Quad processor?  Well, they managed it although I am sure it was pretty easy to do with Microsoft Windows as the operating system.

Much of that comes to the fact that the original MSO/DPO5000 Series ran on a HDD that when paired with the large size of the Tekscope app (which runs all the way up to our ultra performance DPO70000SX 70GHz scopes and those scopes get a i7 quad core) and large memory depths; things have a way of slowing down when the instrument is pushed to its limits. There is a fine design balance to power management, processing power, SW and costs in these scopes. In the B model we improved upon this by adding a SSD as standard which I feel greatly improved its boot times and 'slow' interface. On a normal day I don't see any slow down on my MSO5000B Series scope. Its fast and responsive.

[bson]

I think there's a fallacy where just because a foreground application managing a UI and maybe responding to HTTP is neither hard or soft real-time, its response time doesn't matter.  In reality it matters greatly for overall UX and it should in fact be considered soft real-time.

JIT isn't a problem per se, but rather that managed runtimes like .NET tend to be excessively polymorphic so there's no optimization possible.  In addition it needs to pull in a ridiculous number of DLLs because impossible to tell which ones might be needed (and Windows needs to resolve symbols at load time) - that value returned by sort() just might be a Word document.

[BrianH_Tektronix]

KS MSOX/DSOX scopes are very fast in terms of responsiveness. Tek is, on the other hand, very slow.
I have both their mid-high level scopes, a DPO5024 and an MSOX6004A. When it comes to user experience, there is just no comparison. I also use a DPO2024B a lot due to its small size and low value, so I use them in HV environments, cannibalized in HV test equipment we made in house. It is slightly faster than its bigger brother due to simpler function and less memory, but still very slow.

That was my experience when evaluating the Tektronix MSO5000 series.  How can the interface be so slow when it has a Core2 Quad processor?  Well, they managed it although I am sure it was pretty easy to do with Microsoft Windows as the operating system.

Much of that comes to the fact that the original MSO/DPO5000 Series ran on a HDD that when paired with the large size of the Tekscope app (which runs all the way up to our ultra performance DPO70000SX 70GHz scopes and those scopes get a i7 quad core) and large memory depths; things have a way of slowing down when the instrument is pushed to its limits. There is a fine design balance to power management, processing power, SW and costs in these scopes. In the B model we improved upon this by adding a SSD as standard which I feel greatly improved its boot times and 'slow' interface. On a normal day I don't see any slow down on my MSO5000B Series scope. Its fast and responsive.

Cam I retrofit an SSD to my DPO5024? Mine has a P8400 processor. Thanks.

You may order an SSD w/windows license for a DPO5000 (non-B) scope. It will come with the drive, mount, windows license, specific drivers and tekscope installed. I wouldn't recommend retrofitting it, but I can't keep you from trying either. No guarantees it will work.

[nctnico]

I'd get an SSD (or mSata together with an mSata to IDE converter) and use a disk cloning utility to get an identical copy of the original hard drive. It wouldn't hurt to have a backup for the original hard drive anyway.

[EEVblog]

I don't think anyone has mentioned this.
Give the 5-Series comes with both Windows and embedded OS options, what are the operational an GUI differences?
Are they identical to the end user and you wouldn't know which one you are running?
All the shots I've seen show the traditional windows menu bar across the top, and that always gives me the heebie-jeebies. It always reminds me of the horrible to use top of the line scopes, where nothing is optmised. But I know this one has drag'n'stuff.
What is the embedded OS? Windows CE? or something else?

[w2aew]

I don't think anyone has mentioned this.
Give the 5-Series comes with both Windows and embedded OS options, what are the operational an GUI differences?
Are they identical to the end user and you wouldn't know which one you are running?
All the shots I've seen show the traditional windows menu bar across the top, and that always gives me the heebie-jeebies. It always reminds me of the horrible to use top of the line scopes, where nothing is optmised. But I know this one has drag'n'stuff.
What is the embedded OS? Windows CE? or something else?

All of videos/images that you've seen is with the embedded OS, which is Linux based (don't ask me which flavor, I don't know).  In this mode, the OS is intended to be "closed".  When running Win10, the UI will be virtually identical - with the exception that the scope UI can be minimized like any other Win10 program.  I haven't seen/used a Win10 drive in this scope yet.

[abraxa]

All of videos/images that you've seen is with the embedded OS, which is Linux based (don't ask me which flavor, I don't know).  In this mode, the OS is intended to be "closed".

Wait, what? When running linux, the machine is locked down but when running Windows, you can use it like a regular PC? While I do understand that corporate software usually is built around Windows (and Excel...), it's still a what-the-eff for me. Locking down the only open-source OS the scope can run?

Yeah yeah, I know. I'm not the target audience for this scope. I just find it absurd.

[Howardlong]

All of videos/images that you've seen is with the embedded OS, which is Linux based (don't ask me which flavor, I don't know).  In this mode, the OS is intended to be "closed".

Wait, what? When running linux, the machine is locked down but when running Windows, you can use it like a regular PC? While I do understand that corporate software usually is built around Windows (and Excel...), it's still a what-the-eff for me. Locking down the only open-source OS the scope can run?

Yeah yeah, I know. I'm not the target audience for this scope. I just find it absurd.

(My emphasis)

I'd hazard a guess that bearing in mind the price point, the target demographic won't be the kind who'd want to hack this scope.

[Someone]

All of videos/images that you've seen is with the embedded OS, which is Linux based (don't ask me which flavor, I don't know).  In this mode, the OS is intended to be "closed".

Wait, what? When running linux, the machine is locked down but when running Windows, you can use it like a regular PC? While I do understand that corporate software usually is built around Windows (and Excel...), it's still a what-the-eff for me. Locking down the only open-source OS the scope can run?

Yeah yeah, I know. I'm not the target audience for this scope. I just find it absurd.

(My emphasis)

I'd hazard a guess that bearing in mind the price point, the target demographic won't be the kind who'd want to hack this scope.

I still think its funny that they push the optional windows operating system as the way to run your own analysis software right on the scope if the "other" operating choice system is equally capable of running arbitrary code but they wont let you access it. As in the past with windows scopes you take a "clean" image of the system and then add all your modifications to it knowing you can roll back to the safe state, why not offer that with the linux OS too?

[abraxa]

I'd hazard a guess that bearing in mind the price point, the target demographic won't be the kind who'd want to hack this scope.

To "hack" is a bit of a stretch here, imo. My point was that it's ironic that the only truly open OS available for this scope is artificially locked down.

For the marketing department, one could argue that it would allow companies that need custom data processing to do it in a non-Windows environment. At my company, not a single scope that runs Windows is allowed on the network, making it moot for those scopes to even offer network capabilities as the OS totally undermines the effort. Running linux, those scopes would be allowed on the network, making it more feasible to integrate custom data processing into the workflow. Such use cases are too rare to have any impact on management, though. Then again, there is LabView for linux, too...

[2N3055]

To "hack" is a bit of a stretch here, imo. My point was that it's ironic that the only truly open OS available for this scope is artificially locked down.

For the marketing department, one could argue that it would allow companies that need custom data processing to do it in a non-Windows environment. At my company, not a single scope that runs Windows is allowed on the network, making it moot for those scopes to even offer network capabilities as the OS totally undermines the effort. Running linux, those scopes would be allowed on the network, making it more feasible to integrate custom data processing into the workflow. Such use cases are too rare to have any impact on management, though. Then again, there is LabView for linux, too...

Well I think you are missing the point here.. If you work in environment that is security aware so they don't allow you connect Windows scopes to network, reason for it is not because they run Windows, but because they don't run embedded, closed, user tamper proof OS.  They run Windows, so you can install things on the scope and that thing security people dont like. 
As soon as you would get Linux scope with fully unlocked, user accessible OS, they would ban that too.. In a microsecond.. For the same reason.

[DimitriP]

At my company, not a single scope that runs Windows is allowed on the network, making it moot for those scopes to even offer network capabilities as the OS totally undermines the effort

The network is there for your convenience. Just like electricity, air, chairs and desks.

[Someone]

At my company, not a single scope that runs Windows is allowed on the network, making it moot for those scopes to even offer network capabilities as the OS totally undermines the effort

The network is there for your convenience. Just like electricity, air, chairs and desks.

Sounds like you've never worked in a site that wont let you bring in your own chair or use unapproved/untagged electrical devices, they tend to be the places with rules for equipment attached to the network too. Once over the hump of bureaucracy then you get a nice subnet to stick all the unapproved equipment on and get back on with working.

[2N3055]

At my company, not a single scope that runs Windows is allowed on the network, making it moot for those scopes to even offer network capabilities as the OS totally undermines the effort

The network is there for your convenience. Just like electricity, air, chairs and desks.

It is at your home.. In a big company it is vital infrastructure... Have you missed the news last few weeks, when hospitals in UK didn't work for days because of the virus..

[madires]

Some companies are concerned about security and don't support BYOT (Bring You Own Trojan). Usually lab networks are separated for a good reason or two.

[snoopy]

A new video on youtube

[Fungus]

Awful video.

I like the stacked mode. All 'scopes should do that.

Edit: Stacked mode is at time 4:05 in the video