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Exclusive: BIOS will be dead in three years
Thinq ^ | 6/8/2010

Posted on 06/08/2010 4:52:14 PM PDT by markomalley

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To: Slump Tester
No more cheap motherboards. This will put them through the roof.

False. Most chipset and board manufacturers work together to get these pushed out to the enterprise server market first. HP's G7 ProLiant line is supposed to have UEFI support. As corporations snatch up the latest tech gear (mine's usually first in line), the price of the technology will go down.

Initially, the price of desktop mobos may go up, but within 3 years, UEFI will be ubiquitous and no more expensive than the standard ATX BIOS mobos out there now.

This is VERY good news. I'm excited to see what this can do. The patent application is awesome. The simplification with this new tech is amazing. Combine this with Intel's Nehalem (QPI), SATA 5.0 GBps, and x64 architecture, and we're talking about machines that are going to blow the doors off of anything on the market today. Add dual- or quad-SLI graphics into the mix, and I can't even begin to imagine what the gaming market is going to look like in 5 years. BattleField Bad Company 2 is already ri-damn-diculous. This is going to make that look like Pong.

41 posted on 06/09/2010 4:04:55 AM PDT by rarestia (It's time to water the Tree of Liberty.)
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To: sionnsar

Thanks, look forward to staying current.


42 posted on 06/09/2010 4:44:09 AM PDT by Texas Fossil (Government, even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.)
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To: markomalley

Where does the tin foil hat plug in, so that I can communicate with the ships in orbit behind the sun?


43 posted on 06/09/2010 4:50:39 AM PDT by CholeraJoe ("Here is something you can't understand...")
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To: sionnsar
The BIOS is about to go the way of the geezer.

From Wikipedia:

"Geezer is a term for a man. It can carry either the connotation of age and eccentricity or, in the UK, that of self-education such as craftiness or stylishness."

44 posted on 06/09/2010 6:11:42 AM PDT by Zuben Elgenubi
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To: markomalley; rdb3; Calvinist_Dark_Lord; GodGunsandGuts; CyberCowboy777; Salo; Bobsat; JosephW; ...

45 posted on 06/09/2010 6:22:53 AM PDT by ShadowAce (Linux -- The Ultimate Windows Service Pack)
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To: bamahead
That board seems nice. I'm going to need three boards soon and this one will be in my list.


46 posted on 06/09/2010 6:44:40 AM PDT by rdb3 (The mouth is the exhaust pipe of the heart. My heart is ripped, RIP Bahbah.)
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To: markomalley

It’s about time, but had to happen eventually.

The industry usually follows Apple in ditching old tech. Macs have been using EFI since they went Intel four years ago. Microsoft enabled EFI support on x86 Windows since Vista SP1 (on Itanium since W2K), so the ability to ship OEM Windows machines with EFI has been out there for a while. It’s just that few dared to make the leap.

But they have no choice but to do it soon. It will really hit home for consumers that they need EFI when hard drives larger than 2 TB become common because BIOS with MBR has a 2 TB limit on partitions. They’ll wonder why they can’t format their whole hard drive, or why their 3 TB drive came with two 1.5 TB partitions.


47 posted on 06/09/2010 6:50:08 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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To: MindBender26
Can someone translate this into 3 or 4 “why I should care’ sentences?

Bigger hard drives, get a GUI for pre-OS boot stuff (like on how a Mac you select your boot drive with a mouse), and a whole range of new possibilities given that the network and video cards can be functioning even before the OS boots.

48 posted on 06/09/2010 6:54:43 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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To: perfect_rovian_storm
It’s so cutting edge that they had to get someone from 1996 to design the GUI!

This is your standard lazy. When presented with the ability to do GUI with EFI, they just re-created the old text-based BIOS UI with prettier colors and icons. No original thought as to how they could leverage the GUI to do more and be more user-friendly.

49 posted on 06/09/2010 6:57:04 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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To: antiRepublicrat

It seems to me like this could open the door for companies like Google to offer their OS on chip.


50 posted on 06/09/2010 7:10:00 AM PDT by Moonman62 (The issue of whether cheap labor makes America great should have been settled by the Civil War.)
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To: ShadowAce

Good Ping! Thanks.

51 posted on 06/09/2010 7:10:49 AM PDT by martin_fierro (< |:)~)
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To: 2111USMC
I can remember paying more for a 20 meg. hard drive than a 1T drive costs now.

About the only thing getting better is electronics.

52 posted on 06/09/2010 7:22:10 AM PDT by Anti-Bubba182
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To: bamahead

I was wondering what the benefit of it was...now I see. You’d think the article would have covered the reasons why it will be a must have.


53 posted on 06/09/2010 7:26:32 AM PDT by for-q-clinton (If at first you don't succeed keep on sucking until you do succeed)
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To: markomalley
I had a Gateway PC from '94 or so that had something approximating this. It was AWFUL, because (for some reason) the firmware was prone to corruption.

The nice thing about BIOS is that it's essentially bullet-proof. Most people -- the VAST majority of users -- don't need to diddle in their computer's privates.

54 posted on 06/09/2010 7:31:05 AM PDT by r9etb
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To: darkwing104
Will it make Windows work faster?

Oh, yeah! ( /s) C code operations might take up to 3-10 times the execution time as comparable assembly code execution time. Whenever your computer executes one of the simplest, elemental routines, finishing that routine will often take much longer, and be accumulated, multiplicatively with each iteration for more complex-yet-oft-used routines.

Let's see, do you suppose it's important for characters being placed on the screen be a fast operation?

The saving grace is that most microprocessors have so much more computing power than is used by non-technical applications, that doing this allows manufacturers to use C-trained coders instead of the more rare assembly code toads, such a I. Excess available computing power will hide the digression UEFI inherently makes.

Also, the coding work environment is homogenized and able to shed the stone knives and bearskins of debugging assembly language code and microcode. Integration (think security) between basic input/output and fancy, pretty-looking, higher-level applications is made easier for the non-assembly-conversant C-coders.

HF

55 posted on 06/09/2010 7:32:44 AM PDT by holden
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To: bamahead
I don't see how any of what you said there was uniquely made possibly by UEFI, but perhaps you can explain.

HF

56 posted on 06/09/2010 7:35:14 AM PDT by holden
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To: markomalley

Wouldn’t want to have the first generation of these. Fortunately, I just recently built a new desktop that should be good for 8-10 years. Last one I had I finally retired after 9 years of service. It’s amazing how much power a modern desktop can have.


57 posted on 06/09/2010 7:48:28 AM PDT by zeugma (Waco taught me everything I needed to know about the character of the U.S. Government.)
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To: rarestia
SATA 5????

Really?

Man I want to see all of this good stuff.

58 posted on 06/09/2010 9:41:50 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach ( Support Geert Wilders)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

Well, the 5 GBps SATA. The first generation of SATA is 3 GBps. New stuff is quite quick. I want to say it’s SATA2, but I’m not certain.


59 posted on 06/09/2010 9:57:52 AM PDT by rarestia (It's time to water the Tree of Liberty.)
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To: markomalley
I am already so tired of "point and click" I could just scream.

Messing with the BIOS was the only remaining island of text-based IT sanity left to me.

And now, like Guam, it's being capsized...

DOS 3.0 - the last reasonable OS Microsoft ever released.


Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.

60 posted on 06/09/2010 10:06:52 AM PDT by The Comedian (Evil can only succeed if good men don't point at it and laugh.)
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