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Power States of Motherboard Good To Note Down
Power States of Motherboard Good To Note Down
The ACPI specification defines the following seven states (so-called global states) for an ACPI-
compliant computer-system:
G0 (S0): Working
G1, Sleeping subdivides into the four states S1 through S4:
o S1: All processor caches are flushed, and the CPU(s) stop executing instructions.
Power to the CPU(s) and RAM is maintained; devices that do not indicate they
must remain on may be powered down.
o S2: CPU powered off
o S3: Commonly referred to as Standby, Sleep, or Suspend to RAM. RAM remains
powered
o S4: Hibernation or Suspend to Disk. All content of main memory is saved to non-
volatile memory such as a hard drive, and is powered down.
G2 (S5), Soft Off: G2 is almost the same as G3 Mechanical Off, but some components
remain powered so the computer can "wake" from input from the keyboard, clock,
modem, LAN, or USB device.
G3, Mechanical Off: The computer's power consumption approaches close to zero, to the
point that the power cord can be removed and the system is safe for dis-assembly
(typically, only the real-time clock is running off its own small battery).
Furthermore, the specification defines a Legacy state: the state on an operating system which
does not support ACPI. In this state, the hardware and power are not managed via ACPI,
effectively disabling ACPI.
While a device or processor operates (D0 and C0, respectively), it can be in one of several
power-performance states. These states are implementation-dependent, but P0 is always the
highest-performance state, with P1 to Pn being successively lower-performance states, up to an
implementation-specific limit of n no greater than 16.
The Root System Description Pointer is located in a platform-dependent manner, and describes
the rest of the tables.
[edit] History
The first revision of the ACPI specification was released in December 1996 supporting 16 and
32-bit addressing spaces. It wasn't until August 2000 that ACPI received 64-bit address support
as well as support for multiprocessor workstations and servers with revision 2.0. In September
2004, revision 3.0 gave the ACPI specification support for SATA connectors, PCI Express bus,
>256 multiprocessor support, ambient light sensors and user-presence devices, as well as
extending the Thermal model beyond the previous processor centric support. The latest of the
major publications is that of revision 4.0. Released in June 2009, the 4.0 specification added
many new features to the design; most notable are USB 3.0 support, logical processor idling
support, and x2APIC support.[1]