Power management is used in many devices and systems to improve power efficiency, helping to reduce power consumption and/or heat dissipation. For battery-powered mobile devices and systems, power management can help extend operation.
Some platform-level power management may place a processor and/or a chipset into a lower power state which can impact input/output (I/O) performance. As one example where a platform supports bus mastering, an I/O device may initiate a data transfer to system memory when a processor and chipset are in a lower power state. The processor and chipset would have to return to a normal operating state to complete the data transfer and therefore introduce delay which reduces performance.
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