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."
Continued on next page
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."
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.
Thanks, look forward to staying current.
Where does the tin foil hat plug in, so that I can communicate with the ships in orbit behind the sun?
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."
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.
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.
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.
It seems to me like this could open the door for companies like Google to offer their OS on chip.
Good Ping! Thanks.
About the only thing getting better is electronics.
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.
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.
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
HF
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.
Really?
Man I want to see all of this good stuff.
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.
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.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.