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It is made possible in part due to the sleep and protected mode opcodes in the Intel 386 CPU. The first working retail hibernation was in 1992 on the Compaq LTE Lite 386 as noted in its sales material. This is why many experts recommend a frequent shut down or reboot of electronic devices. Both hibernation and sleep preserve memory fragmentation and atrophy that lead to mobile devices working more poorly the longer you avoid a power off. Hibernation is a means of avoiding the burden of saving unsaved data before shutting down and restoring all running programs and re-opening documents and browser tabs. Both shut down and hibernated systems may consume standby power unless they are unplugged. Detaching power from a system in sleep mode results in data loss, while cutting the power of a system in hibernation has no risk the hibernated system can resume when and if the power is restored. On the other hand, a system in sleep mode still consumes power to keep the data in the RAM. A system in sleep mode only needs to power up the CPU and display, which is almost instantaneous. A hibernated system must start up and read data from permanent storage and then transfer that back to RAM, which takes longer and depends on the speed of the permanent storage device, often much slower than RAM memory. Instantaneous resumption is one of the advantages of sleep mode over hibernation. Many systems support a low-power sleep mode in which the processing functions of the machine are lowered, using a trickle of power to preserve the contents of RAM and support waking up. Apple hardware using macOS calls hibernation Safe Sleep. Google and Apple mobile hardware ( Android, Chromebooks, iOS) do not support hibernation. Most desktops also support hibernation, mainly as a general energy saving measure and allows for replacement of a removable battery quickly. It can be set to happen automatically on a low battery alarm. Hibernation is mostly used in laptops, which have limited battery power available. The system can have a total loss of power for an indefinite length of time and then resume to the original state. After hibernating, the hardware is powered down like a regular shutdown.
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