Will BIOS Be Dead in 3 Years?
MSI will begin its shift over to UEFI by the end of the year, with the industry expected to follow over the next three years.
Is the end of BIOS almost upon us? That's the current speculation, with the date of termination expected in the near future. According to an unnamed spokesperson for MSI, the motherboard manufacturer is making the shift over to point and click universal extensible firmware interface (UEFI) systems by Q4 2010/Q1 2011. The change is expected to become "widely adopted" within three years thereafter.
The MSI spokesperson said that the first new products using UEFI will be based on Intel's Sandy Bridge chipset, and will range from entry-level motherboards to high-end solutions. This should be expected, as UEFI is a continuation of Intel's original EFI project designed to replace the clunky, elderly BIOS interface, and to address other problems that have plagued PCs for years, including hard drive storage limits beyond 2 TB.
But upgrading to UEFI isn't as simple as flashing the old BIOS with the new interface. "A UEFI system is generally bigger than a traditional BIOS," the spokesperson said, "and most of the on-board ROM is not that big, so you can’t just flash UEFI into a traditional BIOS board."
Motherboard manufacturers are also holding off on the new technology because of the resources needed to make the change. There's also a customization issue: UEFI doesn't support every board. Manufacturers who design unique features and technologies for their products--those that only communicate with BIOS--may not function with UEFI installed. Designs will eventually need to be re-worked to incorporate the new interface.
But MSI believes that UEFI is the way to go, the next evolutionary step even though UEFI still needs some work. The company may be right, especially as consumers require more and more storage space than what BIOS can currently handle.
don't be afraid of the future... efi will not make it worse...
I wonder when an AMD board will come out...
Before you do any more news on the subject, please read up on MBR's and GPT's, and find out where the 2TB problem arises. It has nothing to do with the BIOS, nothing nothing nothing. I read news here all the time, and some of it is great, but spreading misinformation, when you've already been corrected isn't acceptable.
The 2 TB problem arises when trying to BOOT from a GPT partition using a BIOS, not reading one.
32-bit XP doesn't support GPT. 64-bit XP does.
All NT6 OSes (Vista/Server 2008/7/Server 2008 R2) support GPT.
ready4dis: So educate us: what are the workarounds that you say exist? Are they as haphazard as, say, using uncrippled PAE to address more than 4 GB of RAM using a 32-bit Windows OS?
Hogwash.
BIOS uses Master Boot Records (MBR) to boot from a drive. The MBR is 512 bytes of which 64 bytes is the partition table, 16 bytes to fully describe each partition's attributes, so you only have 8 bytes to point at each partition's location and size. Only 4 bytes of that can be used to point at each partition's beginning sector. Four bytes is 32 bits, so you can address 2**32 sectors and (2**32)*512 bytes (since there are 512 bytes/sector) = 2.2 E12 or about 2 TB (maximum addressable disk size and also partition size since 4 bytes is also allowed to describe each partition's size with BIOS and MBR).
It's a very cut and dry 2TB limitation baked into BIOS. I discovered this rather painfully with my last build when I tried to use a single 6Tb array. Quite disappointing.
Now once you have booted from a 2TB or smaller partition using windows/macos/linux/name your bootloader you can use software to mount a GPT partition that exceeds 2Tb. You still cannot boot from a partition greater than 2Tb. There's nothing to argue about here, try it and find out for yourself.
who cares!
as long as I can access thid drives as data/multimedia drives.
I got 2 2TB working just fine (not as boot drives) just for storage.