According to the latest research published on GitHub by Zephkek, a cybersecurity enthusiast with experience in low-level programming, ASUS ROG gaming laptops have been riddled with buggy BIOS firmware, causing system hiccups. These hiccups occur in the form of stuttering when watching YouTube, pops on Discord calls, the mouse briefly freezing, and other annoying occurrences. According to this investigation, the issue is not any pre-installed "bloat," old drivers, or the operating system itself. The problem actually lies deeply embedded in ASUS BIOS design, where the system-level operations and component management occur.

To find out what happened, the researcher used the LatencyMon tool, which measures CPU interrupt latency. CPU interrupt latency is an important metric as it tells the CPU to stop its current program execution pipeline and move on to another, higher-priority task. On ASUS ROG laptops, like the Zephyrus M16, the first core in the CPU, which is first accessible by the application, is spending over 90 seconds processing interrupts. In that time that specific CPU core is blocked from doing any other work, which leads to stutter, when some time-sensitive workload is running on that core. Behind all of this is the ACPI.sys implementation of the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) standard, acting as the bridge between firmware and the OS to manage power functions (sleep, hibernate, battery, and thermal reporting) and to assist with Plug-and-Play device discovery and resource configuration. This ACPI.sys interprets ACPI Machine Language (AML), which is a code provided by every BIOS maker, including ASUS in this instance.