Following the merger of Award and Phoenix, both the traditional Award BIOS and the Award BIOS with a Phoenix look are now available. AMI also supplies BIOS software, but this is extremely rare and found only in very few motherboards. Our experience shows that the BIOS from Award (with the Phoenix look) is not very user-friendly - unlike the traditional Award BIOS, which is very logically structured and simple to use.

The BIOS is located inside an EPROM chip, which in turn is accommodated in a socket on the motherboard. The picture shows a later variant of a chip that stores up to 512 kB.

This EPROM chip represents an even older model. It stores up to 256 kB BIOS data.

Both chips when removed: The future belongs to the smaller chip on the right. Technically speaking, it was possible to store up to 1 MB in the small chip.