During a process of transitioning a processing system from sleep mode to active mode, system firmware of the processing system may automatically determine whether an initialization task has been assigned to a component other than system firmware, based on data obtained from a resume descriptor stored in nonvolatile storage of the processing system. The system firmware may skip the initialization task if the initialization task has been assigned to a component other than the system firmware. For example, in one embodiment, the system firmware may determine whether the resume descriptor identifies one or more memory ranges. If so, the system firmware may forego initialization of at least one memory range identified in the resume descriptor when initializing a random access memory (RAM) of the processing system. Other embodiments are described and claimed.