PC BIOS soon to be replaced by UEFI

[Stuart]

The 25 year old PC BIOS will soon be replaced by UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface) that will enable PC's to boot up in a matter of seconds. In 2011 we will start seeing UEFI dominate new PC's, according to BBC News.

UEFI is designed to be much more flexible than the old PC BIOS that dates back to some of the first IBM PC’s since 1979. The BIOS has not changed much in the past 25 years and is one of the main reasons why a PC’s boot-up time is over 25 seconds.

The original EFI specification was developed by Intel but has now evolved into a standard which is now known as UEFI. The UEFI forum, which is a non-profit corporation, is responsible for the management and promotion of the specification. Their goal is to replace the 25 year old BIOS that’s responsible for slow boot-ups.

Mark Doran, head of the UEFI Forum, is quoted as saying: "With UEFI we're getting it under a handful of seconds. In terms of boot speed, we're not at instant-on yet but it is already a lot better than conventional BIOS can manage, and we're getting closer to that every day."

Some PC manufactures have already started using UEFI and system administrators who oversee thousands of PC and servers have already seen the benefits of swapping old-fashioned Bios for UEFI.

[ryanrich]

About time! All Intel based Macs have used EFI since early 2006, much better!

[DeathStrike]

About time! All Intel based Macs have used EFI since early 2006, much better!

OOh. so that why my work mac boots so quick.

great article. Anyone know if these systems are available commercially yet?

Looks like i will be waiting for this new tech before i upgrade then.

[SykomantiS]

Very interesting.

How does basic hardware configuration and overclocking work on these systems?
I know absolutely nothing about it.

[hobojvr]

Faster boot time? Bah. Put the PC to sleep. 1 Second boot time

[Stuart]

Faster boot time? Bah. Put the PC to sleep. 1 Second boot time

1 second? Sheesh, you must have an uber computer.

[hobojvr]

Faster boot time? Bah. Put the PC to sleep. 1 Second boot time

1 second? Sheesh, you must have an uber computer.

No not at all, I just sleep (not hibernate) instead of shutdown. The PC appears off - no fans, spinning. If I hit the power button, I'm at the login screen instantly. I can go like this for weeks or months until I have to go move my PC to go to a LAN, etc. I do the same at work.

A friend at work told me one advantage of the new BIOS architecture is the support of huge hard-drives. That's about how much I know about it.

[A_BULLET]

can uefi also be used on current computers?

[Ron2K]

It's entirely up to the motherboard manufacturer. Also, according to my brief research, Windows only supports 64-bit UEFI implementations (there are virtually no 32-bit implementations), so that's another reason to go 64-bit if you haven't already. (Windows added UEFI support in Vista SP1 and Server 2008. You won't be able to use XP on a UEFI system.)

[KillerByte]

There are some motherboards that will be released early next year that will have EUFI. (I am unable to tell you about these boards due to NDAs)

But I can tell you that I have worked on one of these new boards and have used the EUFI. Its a big change from the old BIOS.