hardware, standard (ACPI) An open industry standard
The key element of the standard is power management with two
important improvements. First, it puts the
OS in control of
power management. In the currently existing
APM model most
of the power management tasks are run by the
BIOS, with
limited intervention from the OS. In ACPI, the BIOS is
responsible for the dirty details of communicating with
hardware equipment but the control is in the OS.
The other important feature is bringing power management
desktop as well as into servers. Extremely low consumption
states, i.e., in which only memory, or not even memory is
powered, but from which ordinary interrupts (real time clock,
keyboard, modem, etc.) can quickly wake the system, are today
available in portables only. The standard should make these
available for a wider range of systems.
chipset, and for some functions even the
CPU has to be
designed for it. Microsoft is heavily driving a move toward
It remains to be seen how much hardware manufacturers will
embrace the technology and whether other operating system
vendors will support it.
(1998-03-27)