How does Asus Super Active Engine, Instant On Work?

Asus has been pushing the Super Active Engine Instant on capabilities on their netbooks and low end notebooks. Its supposed to let you resume from sleep or hybernate in 2 seconds.

Does anyone know how this works, and what the advantage is over normal resume from sleep.

Also does anyone know if this is in firmware or installed under windows. So for example if you swap out the drive in a notebook with it will you have to find it and reinstall to get the fast resumes after an upgrade?

 

Instant-on basically skips the full POST and other pre-boot BIOS code (option ROMs, etc), and during resume from suspend (NOT hibernate), it optimizes device reinitialization so that the system comes back fast. You may notice that your BIOS setup menu is drastically restricted with Instant-On enabled. I'm not sure what super active engine is, you probably mean super hybrid engine (SHE) II, which is just power management software.

There is a marketing-speak description of features here: ASUS

 

Yep, I'm talking about SHE II, i think their full name is super active hybrid engine II which just sounds cheesy but anyway.

I know what intels rapid technologies do, they are part of the chipset code. But I don't know where this SHE II resides, and how it is providing Instant On capabilities to their low end units.

For example, their asus 401x selling through best buy right now has SHE II provided Instant On (2 seconds from sleep). Im curious if SHE II is software thats installed or part of their firmware?

It has near ultrabook resume capabilities, Ive thought about putting an ssd in one to boost the boot speeds and performance, but don't want to lose the instant on if I went that direction.

 

I had the impression as well that awesome hybrid engine allowed instant-on to be cut down, and so on. And that they had cut the resume down to 2s from hibernate/suspend to disk, or s4. That's not actually the case. The resume is from sleep, or s3. The resume from disk is.. fast, sure, specially on an ssd. But no quicker or slower than anything else. We're talking about going from perhaps 10 to 2 seconds from the worst possible resume situation, that kind of thing.

It's not really dependent on the disk you're using.

SHE is used for other things on the Eee, though. To run dynamic under and overclocks for the gpu and cpu, that kind of thing. I'm not sure if that's actually set in the processor state application in the same way on all the laptops asus has with the software installed..

There's something being done with software control for device power, though. Such as enabling or disabling usb-charging via the software application. That's part of the SHE again. Same with being able to signal the laptop to go to s4 suspend from an s3 suspend, without waking up first, when the battery is critical. This is pretty neat stuff.

Have the impression that most of this is serious snake-oil, though. That they are using generally speaking the openly documented acpi calls, but wrap them in their own application layer. And have a neat acpi script with three lines magically transforming from "suspend.ini" to "Awesome Super Mutant Hybrid Master Engine II".

 

Thanks, If they are using the acpi calls its likely just a bit of code installed so it could get wiped away if you started clean or switched to an ssd.

 

Mm. No, it's probably part of the driver package and the power4gear thing.

 

SHE is in the BIOS, and the power4gear software for windows is the front-end. Instant on has a windows sidebar gadget as the frontend.

There is no "active" in the name.

 

My question regarding Asus Instant On is this .. when you shut your computer off .. is it off? Meaning is the hard drive secure and not spinning? When I purchased my Asus a couple of months ago Instant On was installed already and active? It is my contention that when one travels with their laptop their computer should be totally off, not in idle mode. My grandson had his idling laptop in his case on a train and with significant bumps, the spinning hard drive made contact with the reader tip or laser or what ever it is and damaged it enough where the computer would not turn on anymore.
thanks.. any good info on this would be appreciated.

 

Yes, it's off. Instant-on just means that the power on is very fast compared to a normal startup.

Even when you put your computer to sleep (instead of powering it off completely), the hard drive spins down.

 

The Instant On feature utilizes Express Gate (a.k.a Splashtop), which is a proprietary moniker per Asus. See internals for more info on the hardware implementation and how it allows for quick boot time.

P.S. There is no laser in a disk drive, though they are quite susceptible to shock, so the bumpy ride would have been liable whether the arm was parked or the disk was powered and spinning.

 

There is a drawback : with Instant on, no boot password is required...