Once restarting, you’ll need to press the appropriate key to enter your BIOS settings. It will require a system shutdown or reboot, as you need to get into the BIOS settings. While it does take a much longer time to return to what you were doing, this state makes it so that you are losing no power whatsoever.Ĭhanging Performance States, C-States and Sleep StatesĬhanging Sleep States is pretty easy. Power is cut off from everything, including peripherals and any external hard drives. This is when it’s in its lowest power setting, which also means it takes a long time to wake. S4, referred to as Hibernation: The final sleep state is when your system goes into hibernation.RAM maintains power, and will generally allow you to quickly return to what you were doing before the system was put in Sleep. S3, commonly referred to as Sleep: This state is where all system context is lost, except for RAM.S2: Another low wake latency state, S2 is very similar to S1, but all CPU and system cache is flushed/lost, as the processor is shut down (i.e.In this state, the CPU stops executing instructions, but power is still maintained to the CPU and RAM, allowing you to return to your last system state. S1: S1 takes up less power than S0, as the system is sent into a low wake latency state.In the S0 state, the processor is ready for instruction and the system is fully usable. S0: Similar to how performance states are ranked, S0 is the most demanding state, while S1, S2 and so on, are slightly less intensive.Here’s the different types of Sleep States your processor can go into: PCMech’s very own Christian De Looper did a great job explaining the difference between these two states, but there’s a lot happening under the hood, too.
On many Windows machines, you’re given the option to send your computer into Sleep/Standby and Hibernation. You might be familiar with many of the S-states, particularly if you use a Windows machine. While what’s listed are the most basic C-states, manufacturers can add up to a total of ten C-states. It’s important to note that there can be more than just four C-states. Many processors will have different variations of the C3-state, so the time it’ll take for the processor to return to the C0-state highly depends on the manufacturer of the hardware.
That would make P2 less intensive than P1, and so on. P0 is the maximum power and frequency state, meaning P1 is a little less intensive than P0. These states can go from (P0, the highest performance state, all the way up to P16, depending on the manufacturer). SpeedStep (and other brands’ similar implementations) is, in essence a way to dynamically scale the processor’s P-states through software. Intel actually calls it SpeedStep (though this trademark expired in 2012), but AMD might call them PowerNow! or Cool’n’Quiet in their processors.
Not all processor manufacturers refer to a performance state as a P-state. To find out more about these states and what they do, follow along below. One of these global states is for computer sleeping, which is split up between four “Sx” states or S-states (S1 through S4). There are also global states (“Gx” states). In its most basic form, a P-state is a performance state. Figuring out what P-states and “Sx” states are and how they can affect your computer can be a confusing endeavor.