VIDEO: UEFI Replacing Ancient BIOS Tested
Will BIOS soon become a thing of the past?
Although Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, UEFI, has been around for quite some time now, most motherboards and computers are still running the effective but ancient BIOS software. On wednesday, a Swedish website got its hands on a motherboard with a working UEFI system and tested it out, giving us a first real look at a polished and working UEFI.
As you can see in the video below, UEFI provides a huge overhaul in the graphical interface compared to our current bios screens. (pictured to the right, yuck) In addition to a sexy new interface, UEFI systems provide several technical advantages over the current BIOS systems.
UEFI advantages include:
Ability to boot faster than current BIOS systems
Ability to boot from drives exceeding 2TB in capacity
Better and stronger support for modern software and drivers
CPU-Independent architecture
CPU-Independent drivers
Unfortunately, we don't have any more information about when UEFI motherboards such as the one tested will be available for purchase, but seeing as how SweClockers were able to get their hands on a working version, that probably won't be too far from now.
Video posted by SweClockers November 03, 2010.
Several months?..
Video posted by SweClockers November 03, 2010.
Several months?..
It was mostly because of legacy issues. If I remember correctly no 32-bit windows os supports efi. This rules out the most common os, windows xp.
As soon as possible I hope. x86 is a bloated, inefficient instruction set, especially due to the properietary extensions. In an ideal world, an alternative to x86 would be found, but that's unlikely to happen.
However, simply dropping the properietary extensions and creating a single, simplified instruction set would be an incredible improvement already.
about all the x86 haters, what would be better is for a standards organisation be made for x86 to allow the deprecation of old features and reclasification and cleanup of the opcode space for a new generation of cpu's, maybe also since they are becoming multi core having a legacy core or 2 and the newer cores running on the cleaned up x86 architecture perhaps?
MSI have motherboard supporting both BIOS and UEFI for months....http://www.msi.com/html/popup/MB/uefi/download.html
If there is not any major breeding problems with UEFI, this is definitely something that can make life in computer world a little bit easier.