Posted on 06/08/2010 4:52:14 PM PDT by markomalley
It's the one major part of the PC that's still reminiscent of the PC's primordial, text-based beginnings, but the familiarly-clunky BIOS could soon be on its deathbed, according to MSI. The motherboard maker says it's now making a big shift towards point and click UEFI systems, and it's all going to kick off at the end of this year.
Speaking to THINQ, a spokesperson for the company in Taiwan who wished to remain anonymous said that "MSI will start to phase in UEFI starting from the end of this year, and we expect it will be widely adopted after three years."
According to the MSI mole, the first new UEFI products will be based on Intel's Sandy Bridge chipset, spanning the whole field from entry-level boards to high-end kit. The company says that it expects the boards to be introduced towards the end of this year, and into early 2011. "We won’t consider UEFI as an expensive premium feature," said the spokesperson, "but as a must-have for everyone!"
MSI plans to start introducing UEFI on its Sandy Bridge motherboards later this year
UEFI (universal extensible firmware interface) is a continuation of Intel's original EFI project, which was designed to replace the BIOS with a user-friendly point-and-click interface, as well as addressing many other troublesome areas of the PC's legacy.
MSI has previously dabbled in UEFI in 2008, when it introduced its Click BIOS on a few motherboards based on Intel's P45 chipsets. However, the move to UEFI is now starting to become much more important because of its implications for storage.
Last month, Seagate revealed to THINQ that a UEFI system would be an essential requirement in order for a PC to boot from a drive larger than 2TB.
MSI revealed its first UEFI Click BIOS system in 2008
MSI's spokesperson described this as a "big factor," explaining that the "default storage size for the general public is getting bigger and bigger." He predicts that "mainstream notebooks will use almost 1TB of storage next year, not to mention desktop systems, so we need to move forward to UEFI fast!"
Implementing a UEFI system isn't an easy job for motherboard manufacturers used to working with standard BIOS technology, though. Our source explained that motherboard manufacturers had held off moving to UEFI because of the "huge resources you have to throw at it."
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With regards to the old BIOS, he points out that there's an attitude of "if it isn’t broken; don’t need to fix it. Unless you have a strong determination to upgrade it, most manufactures will stick to a traditional, easy and familiar old solution."
There are a lot of issues to address here, not least the fact that a standard BIOS can't simply be flashed with a new UEFI system. "A UEFI system is generally bigger than a traditional BIOS," explains the MSI insider, "and most of the onboard ROM is not that big, so you can’t just flash UEFI into a traditional BIOS board."
A UEFI system replaces the text-based BIOS with a user-friendly point and click system
He also points out that "UEFI doesn’t support every board; you have to use certain code with certain motherboards."
Motherboard companies spend a lot of time developing their own features and technology that distinguish their motherboards from those of the competition. If these features are designed to interface with the code in a traditional BIOS, then they may not be able to communicate with a UEFI system.
"The main difference between a traditional BIOS and UEFI is programming," said our source, pointing out that "UEFI is written in C, rather than the assembly code used in a traditional BIOS." However, he points out that this means that there's much more flexibility with the code.
According to MSI, there's still a lot of work to be done on developing UEFI, but the company's spokesperson says that the cost of implementing the final systems should be minor. "We think this is trend for future," he said, adding that UEFI should be a "basic feature for all end-users."
an essential requirement in order for a PC to boot from a drive larger than 2TB.
My first PC was an 8088 processor (XT). I can still remember my brother-in-law telling me that a 20 MB hard drive was all I would ever need.
Pardon me, we will ALWAYS have geezers. Geezers are not extinct. I think perhaps you meant "go the way of the Dodo bird".
Yep, I got a 80 MB for my 386 and thought I was set for life for hard drive space.
I am not a "geek" but a geezer RF techie who likes computers. Please add me to the ping list. Have been running Linux for over 10+ years.
Well I’ve only heard this a dozen times before so I guess we’ll see. When it does happen, let’s hope it works better than the new Vista/W7 Boot Configuration Data (BCD) process. That has to be one of the biggest steps backwards in history, at least from the administrator/user perspective.
Texas Fossil, you are now on the Fossil Geek Ping List! *\;-)
No more cheap motherboards. This will put them through the roof.
It’s an ASUS M4A89GTD PRO / USB 3 motherboard. It’s got an AMD 890GX chipset, and I run a Phenom II X4 965. 4GB of RAM. It’s a full ATX form factor board. And it screams :)
There’s a good writeup on this board here:
http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/reviews/motherboards/ASUS_M4A89GTD_PRO_USB3_3.html
The Motherboard was very inexpensive. I got it at a place called MicroCenter for around $139 before rebates last month, and that was on sale. It was part of a bundle deal with AMD processors. It’s got HDMI, USB3, On-board Firewire (which is great). Sound + Video are integrated, but I have an nVidia 9600 card in here.
Previous to this, my last ASUS board was in an old i486. That board lasted me for years. I also like Super Micro boards. You get what you pay for definitely, but this stuff has gotten extremely cheap lately.
In addition to the UEFI, it’s got some geeky overclocking features, plus a Windows based overclocking software, that seems to work exceptionally. You can modify your clock speed ON THE FLY from within the OS. It’s pretty ridiculous. Plus it comes with their ExpressGate - which is their UEFI OS.
Now you're implying that only Geezers use boards with BIOS now. Everyone(with a few exceptions)has BIOS on their PC motherboards, young and old alike. I dare say that the young will remember BIOS as well as geezers and for a longer time since they will live longer.
cool, thanks for the info. MicroCenter is about 15 miles from me, so that’s handy. I was looking through the ASUS website while I waited for a response from you as well. It’s really hard to tell what boards have UEFI based on the info (you have to drill through all the details and comparisons to get at what you want to find out).
I really appreciate the response!
As I’m sort of going through the info, I’m not really sure you’d call what this ASUS board has a UEFI after all. It boots to a GUI OS and that happens before the POST, but the ‘ExpressGate’ product doesn’t give you much in the way of BIOS configuration options like the article describes. So, on second glance, that’s really all it is, just an OS.
Turns out my ASUS board does have a traditional AMI ROM based BIOS. When I built the thing, I knew that I had been in and out of a BIOS interface, even though the boot sequence is very slick and graphical. But I guess I’ve mistaken this ASUS ExpressGate product for a UEFI, which in actuality, it’s really just an added OS that runs on a ROM. And you do have to physically install it. It came with the drivers.
I’m still super pleased with this board though.
I am running the ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 with a Thuban 1090T ,...love it!
Smokes my 940....
Using Linux Mint on both ...
Instruction manual talks about updating the BIOS.
I see this as a step forward for the desktop class
of motherboard. It is perfectly worthless for the
PC104 embedded systems CPU board. Small
footprint rules that world. Systems with only a
serial or USB port for “console” I/O won’t be
appropriate for UEFI.
Not so fast. I just spent the last week getting a new, bigger desk into my office so that I’d have the real estate to replace my not so nice ADDS 2020 terminal with the beautiful VT-102 that’s been waiting for me in the garage the past few months. Now the VT-102 is in, and the display has been tweaked to perfection (the characters at the top of the screen were a wee bit taller than those on the bottom.)
It’s hooked up to a beautiful Ampro Little Board Plus, a 4MHz Z-80 with SCSI hooked up to 88MB of hard disk I’ll never fill (I never did fill the 10MB on my Kaypro 10, after all.) That system has a sweet BIOS and a very configurable BDOS as well.
And I’ll still be using it when all these new mobos will be landfill, while those chasing the next great thing will still be chasing.
Yeah, I use newer systems but they’re just disposable for-the-moment things—I just get a cheap netbook since it’s not worth investing more time, effort, money, and care than that. For a real computer you’ve got to get one from before they were built to be used for more than the nonce, before all your data was treated as disposable since they just want you to buy your content from the movie and recording industries, and re-buy it every time a new format comes out. Before ‘86 or thereabouts.
BIOS is dead? Nah, the =real= BIOSes are still running happily and will for a long time. The new toilet paper systems will go where they were built to go at the sound of the next flush lever pull.
Meanwhile I’ll be here, writing whatever I want for my system in Turbo Pascal 3.0 and soldering together even simpler systems for fun since new ones aren’t any fun any more (http://saundby.com/electronics/8085/ ).
There, that geezer enough for ya? ;)
Foot in mouth, posting for removal.
ping for later...
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