I'm thinking of purchasing a 2011 Ford F-150 with the 5.0 instead of the EcoBoost. While reviews of the 5.0 engine in the F-150 are scant, it looks like it revs pretty well (and is pretty quick), based on some of the recent Ford events for journalists.

My question is: Do horsepower and torque together describe how quickly an engine revs up to its peak RPM? Before you say "torque does that," I'm reminded of big, powerful engines (say, even a ship engine as an example) that may have massive torque, but are slow to increase RPMs quickly despite that huge torque.

So, to put my question another way, if we take any engine, with or without load, apply full throttle and measure how much time it takes to go from idle to max RPM, is the torque completely responsible in determining how much time it takes for that engine to achieve peak RPMs or is this information not completely captured by torque metrics?