Stefan Mileschin

With the mobile world, people have come to expect instant-on, always connected devices. First it was smartphones, and then tablets based off of mobile operating systems which offered the ability to have the device in a deep sleep state, but still able to connect out to various services for notifications and app events.

With Windows 8, Microsoft brought this same always-on model to devices running Windows. It was a big change from the traditional ACPI Sleep states of S3 (Sleep) and S4 (Hibernate) which power down most of the system. Initially Connected Standby was only available on ARM based devices, but shortly after the launch of Windows 8 in October 2012, Clover Trail based tablets began to emerge which also supported this new sleep state. Connected Standby provides one big change over the traditional sleep and hibernate modes – it keeps networking devices powered on in a low power mode and allows apps and services to run in a restrained mode in order to run background tasks and process push notifications.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8038/w...tandby-support