Overview

ACPI is a standard part of the mainstream computing environment. System designers today keep power management in mind throughout-design and development to deliver complete systems including power-managed applications, operating systems, peripherals and drivers.

The key goals for developers in the future are to make power management even more robust, and to reduce wake up time. Improvements in future operating systems will increase the robustness of the overall system and will reduce resume times. The resume time should always be less than 5 seconds, with the target below 1 second. Meeting these goals requires all system components including power supply, BIOS, and operating system to be optimized. The operating system in particular must keep all data needed during resume in the system memory to eliminate the hard drive spin up delay as a component of the wake up time.

Other goals, including reductions in standby and active state power consumption, and integration of new PC technologies, will also drive improvements to power management technology. ACPI power management ships mostly in mobile and desktop systems, not servers, and not all desktop systems ship with S3 sleep state enabled due to issues associated with introduction of the new technology. Nevertheless, specifications, regulations and testing requirements are in place that will ensure all future systems enable power management advancements. Future multiprocessor and server systems are also likely to employ power management to reduce both standby and active power.

Standby and Active State Power Reduction

Energy regulatory agencies throughout the world are continuing to encourage...