BIOS Software Coming to the End of the Road

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
75,399
Move over BIOS, there’s a new sheriff in town. Well, technically not new, UEFI has been around for awhile now, but a much wider acceptance by computer manufacturers will begin in 2011. The immediate effect will be a computer that boots in a few seconds, but that is merely the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

"Conventional Bios is up there with some of the physical pieces of the chip set that have been kicking around the PC since 1979," said Mark Doran, head of the UEFI Forum, which is overseeing development of the technology. Mr Doran said the creators of the original Bios only expected it to have a lifetime of about 250,000 machines - a figure that has long been surpassed.
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it's about fucking time, honestly.
 
ZZZzzz.. wake me up when they are actually on ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI motherboards!! Been hearing about this for years but still MIA!! MaximumPC's Gordon Mah Ung on page 48 of the Sept 2004 MaximumPC's "Dream Machine" issue predicted that Dream Machine 2010 "will lack the BIOS as we now know it"!! Perhaps his prediction will only be a year off!!

Don't mess with Gordon.. his rants make Steve Jobs pee in his pants!!

gordonmaungmotherboardt.jpg


gordonmaungredshirtphas.jpg
 
Curious, what exactly has been stopping this from happening for so long? Laziness?
 
More promises like this, eh? I think I can believe it this time around. There are lots of changes happening...solid state drives are getting cheaper, things are getting more and more plug and play everyday, human interface devices like touch screens and such are becoming much more common, etc .

I can see BIOS being phased out within the next 1 or 2 years. I just hope it does, in fact, happen.
 
Holy crap that article was annoying to read. First of all it's called the BIOS, not Bios. He also wrote said a couple dozen times.
 
Yeah I remember the confusing Unix-like EFI of the first Itaniums (Itania? ^-^)
But "2011 would be the year that sales of UEFI machines start to dominate," really?
When there's almost no UEFI desktop motherboard in the market in October 2010?

It will take quite a while to redevelop all the drivers for all devices from scratch even if it's now in C instead of Assembly language.
And each manufacturer seems to be on his own, developing many different and redundant implementations: Tiano, Aptio, Express Gate. MSI even calls its UEFI system "Click BIOS", adding to the confusion between BIOS and UEFI. On the other, it's a good transition familiar name for the consumer, it's still a BIOS of sorts.
It will probably take even longer to redevelop all the overclocking/tuning tools, which probably won't get the same priority as the features for basic functionality. UEFI Internet connectivity could lead to rich features, but it can also be a backdoor for malicious software, I wonder if security risks have been fully evaluated and prevented for UEFI.

Still, I think UEFI is for the best, especially since the first 3TB hard disks started to appear, but it will probably take much more than this AMI marketing man says to fully roll out and debug. Since UEFI requires much bigger ROM, another possible good thing, or dream of mine, would be the integration of a SSD to the motherboard. Add a generator wheel for your hamster, and you have a self-powered Internet-connected storage-capable motherboard that can record TV and stream music or videos at no operating cost! ^-^
 
"At the moment it can be 25-30 seconds of boot time before you see the first bit of OS sign-on," he said. "With UEFI we're getting it under a handful of seconds."
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Anyone else wait 25-30 seconds before they see the OS start booting? No? Me neither. Wonder wtf is wrong with that dudes computer. Every computer I use takes less than ~5 seconds before the OS starts booting. Hell, I'm sitting at the desktop in 30 seconds from when I hit the power button (give or take)
 
kllrnohj said:
Anyone else wait 25-30 seconds before they see the OS start booting? No? Me neither. Wonder wtf is wrong with that dudes computer. Every computer I use takes less than ~5 seconds before the OS starts booting. Hell, I'm sitting at the desktop in 30 seconds from when I hit the power button (give or take)
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desktops & laptops from BB and walmart. :eek:
 
Apocrypha said:
Curious, what exactly has been stopping this from happening for so long? Laziness?
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Some companies such as Phoenix Technologies have been fighting it in favor of their own system, others like Gateway and MSI did it on a few systems but basically only emulated a normal bios but they probably couldn't do much more than that because Windows didn't officially support until Vista Sp1/WS2008, and even then only in 64-bit windows. My guess is now that 46% of new Windows 7 machines are running 64-bit more people are willing to take a chance on it.
 
kllrnohj said:
Anyone else wait 25-30 seconds before they see the OS start booting? No? Me neither. Wonder wtf is wrong with that dudes computer. Every computer I use takes less than ~5 seconds before the OS starts booting. Hell, I'm sitting at the desktop in 30 seconds from when I hit the power button (give or take)
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About what my Intel DX58SO feels like....it is honestly about 10-15 seconds though.

We need this, how we will be able to install the next version of Windows without full access to 3TB drives :p
 
kllrnohj said:
Anyone else wait 25-30 seconds before they see the OS start booting? No? Me neither. Wonder wtf is wrong with that dudes computer. Every computer I use takes less than ~5 seconds before the OS starts booting.
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Good for you, but it certainly takes more than 15 second on mine if you keep the default POST and other drivers such as BD drive and USB devices. Probably depends on the number of hard drives as well. So I switch the computer on and come back later with a cup of coffee or a mug of tea to log in. Then it takes ages to load Firefox and WMP too.

Firefox has so many memory leaks with Flash (YouTube) and file downloads (hotfile) that I usually need to reboot at least once a day, so every second counts.
 
Bout fucking time. Now we can start booting to drives and partitions larger than 2TB. I bet this is one of the main reasons 3TB drives aren't shipping in large volume right now, and why only one company (Seagate) has even bothered to produce and ship them. Even then, Seagate doesn't want a bunch of returns or their support lines blowing up because idiot customers try to boot from them, so they have only stuck them in external enclosures thus far.
 
My os boots in like 7 seconds.. all you have to do is disable all of the bios bootup bullshit
 
Apocrypha said:
Curious, what exactly has been stopping this from happening for so long? Laziness?
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XP is the main thing. Vista SP1-64 is the first MS OS to support it. It's only supported on win7-64 as well. According to MS the lack of 32bit support is because the hardware vendors want to be free from having to maintain 32 bit drivers on newer products.
 
Kenjiwing said:
My os boots in like 7 seconds.. all you have to do is disable all of the bios bootup bullshit
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How hard you push your OC is a big factor as well. My x58 boards are that fast at stock, with the OC at the redline they take 20-30 seconds.
 
I had a pci IDE card that added a good 15 seconds to the bootup coz my mobo had only 1 IDE channel and a USB hard drive that added another 20 seconds to the count. Since then i've ripped out the extra dvd-rom and hard drive that were attached to the IDE card and knocked 35 seconds off my boot time. Do i notice it. No. Coz i dont stick around to watch the pc boot.

First thing i do in the morning before my first dump of the day is turn my pc on. In the next half hour after a shower and breakfast etc my pc is nicely booted up and waiting. Even when i install new drivers it just gives me an excuse to go get a coffee or have that second dump of the day so i never really notice boot times.

All i really want in a bios is an infallable way to upgrade it without destryoing my system. I've killed 2 or 3 motherboards through no fault of my own simply because something went wrong with the flash.
 
My PC from power on, boot to bios, and to start booting up the OS, takes approximately 8 seconds

So this will decrease it from 8 to 3-5 seconds?

Is there a reason I could care less?

Also, UEFI is being pushed not because "We need it" but because its a Intel backed standard and every UEFI system made they get a cut of the profits

So this is for nobodies benefit but Intel's.

Unless you are -DIEING- for a fully graphical interface and can't stand those "Hard to understand" text bios's, and feel like paying a extra $5-10 on every motherboard purchase just because it has UEFI, this is for you
 
ShamisOMally said:
My PC from power on, boot to bios, and to start booting up the OS, takes approximately 8 seconds

So this will decrease it from 8 to 3-5 seconds?

Is there a reason I could care less?

Also, UEFI is being pushed not because "We need it" but because its a Intel backed standard and every UEFI system made they get a cut of the profits

So this is for nobodies benefit but Intel's.

Unless you are -DIEING- for a fully graphical interface and can't stand those "Hard to understand" text bios's, and feel like paying a extra $5-10 on every motherboard purchase just because it has UEFI, this is for you
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EDIT: My PC has 5 internal hard drives, 2 external via USB to boot
 
Sorry for three replys in a row, I only -WANTED- to do one but I see there is no "Edit post" button anywhere, I see -THREE- quote post buttons, but no edit post button
 
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the traditional BIOS also an issue for booting 2TB+ volumes? For that reason even people who don't give a shit should be happy...not that drives so large are common yet but progress, progress, progress
 
ShamisOMally said:
Sorry for three replys in a row, I only -WANTED- to do one but I see there is no "Edit post" button anywhere, I see -THREE- quote post buttons, but no edit post button
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Just for your information - in the Front Page News Section - there's no edit button.

On topic - when I OC hard, my bios take a bit time to post, but when it's stock - it's blazing fast.
 
Yeah, that's weird, @Shamis, I also recently noticed the Edit button is present in some of my posts, not in others. Any mod cares to explain?

By the way, about that coffee break, since I discovered the Belgian white chocolate with macadamia creamer at Safeway's, I wish boot up would take more time...
 
Mine takes about 30 seconds or so before the BIOS is finished and Win7 starts to boot.
I've got 6 internal SATA drives, 2 internal IDE drives, internal DVD-RW, and 5 external USB drives (4 are always on).
The Externals are what cause my long boot times, less than 10 seconds with them unplugged.
 
Chimel said:
Yeah, that's weird, @Shamis, I also recently noticed the Edit button is present in some of my posts, not in others. Any mod cares to explain?

By the way, about that coffee break, since I discovered the Belgian white chocolate with macadamia creamer at Safeway's, I wish boot up would take more time...
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As already explained, users have no edit privileges in this section of the forum. Whatever you write under the front page new threads is permanent.
 
But yeah I see no problems with traditional bios

Also, drives being bigger then 2TB isn't a bios problem, its a manufacture problem of supporting said drive sizes with bios. If you bought a 4TB drive and you were using a UEFI system that only recognized 3TB drives max, it would only see 3TB of space

Also said, they say there "Isn't space on 1MB of memory bios space for new features" which is also bullcrap, some bios chips are 2MB in size, some boards even have 2 or more bios chips that are 2mb in size each

And with THAT said, even with a 1MB "limit" supposedly, using the latest version of my bios, which handles any hardware I install into my computer, I've never had a BIOS file be any bigger then 280KB in space, I remember for my Athlon Thunderbird 800 bios's only being 80KB in size, so we are nowhere near the "Panic zone" of running out of bios space for 1MB, let alone the 2MB most new motherboard makers put for each bios on a motherboard
 
what boards already have this new bios? (i am looking into buying a new board)
 
Daemas said:
don't worry, game devs will still make 99% of their games 32bit even though no new systems will be coming with 32bit.
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godamnit. If people would switch more content exclusive to 64bit then we could all move forward. 16bit didn't take this long...I want to use more than 2gb of ram in my programs...
 
This will happen after they finally drop the fucking PCI, IDE and any other legacy ports from boards too.
Oh wait, some jackass might want to use an old copy of XP with an IDE drive connected to a pci controller on the new board, can't lose a customer!
 
kllrnohj said:
Anyone else wait 25-30 seconds before they see the OS start booting? No? Me neither. Wonder wtf is wrong with that dudes computer. Every computer I use takes less than ~5 seconds before the OS starts booting. Hell, I'm sitting at the desktop in 30 seconds from when I hit the power button (give or take)
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my x58 sits for a while before posting, always has, and never fails... no idea why and no BIOS update fixes it.
 
DeathPrincess said:
godamnit. If people would switch more content exclusive to 64bit then we could all move forward. 16bit didn't take this long...I want to use more than 2gb of ram in my programs...
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That's because the number of computers sold doubled yearly at that time, so a year after w95 was out it was 50% of the install base, two years later it was 75%,...
 
ShamisOMally said:
Unless you are -DIEING- for a fully graphical interface and can't stand those "Hard to understand" text bios's
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My Compaq Presario (don't remember the numbers, sorry), had this in 1995. It was nice that it let me set a lot of plug-and-play settings that didn't show up in other BIOSes until much later, but it was kind of dumb that it looked like win 3.1, and I think it was running off the hard drive too...
 
DeathPrincess said:
godamnit. If people would switch more content exclusive to 64bit then we could all move forward. 16bit didn't take this long...I want to use more than 2gb of ram in my programs...
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Thank the console makers, friend. Since most games are published simultaneously for PC and console, they have to stick under the console's memory and processor requirements. Which stink. Six gigs of RAM in my box, but it's no good for a game because X360 comes with a fraction of that.
 
This will require a new board, correct? I couldn't replace my BIOS chip...

Yes, I will go read the article now...
 
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