VIDEO: UEFI Replacing Ancient BIOS Tested

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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.

Tuan Mai
Tuan Mai
Tuan Mai is a Los Angeles based writer and marketing manager working within the PC Hardware industry. He has written for Tom's Guide since 2010, with a special interest in the weird and quirky.
42 Comments Comment from the forums
  • sonofliberty08
    so ... when will the ancient x86 be replace ?
    Reply
  • aznshinobi
    Tom's news people need to get on the ball on the latest news, this is like several month old news.
    Reply
  • beans4you
    lol at the arm on the chair bit
    Reply
  • ZyxMEvEuuxcZ
    What took them so long?
    Reply
  • TunaSoda
    I could care less what it 'looks' like so as it has all the features of bios to tweak with
    Reply
  • lothdk
    aznshinobiTom's news people need to get on the ball on the latest news, this is like several month old news.
    Video posted by SweClockers November 03, 2010.
    Several months?..
    Reply
  • Vladislaus
    ZyxMEvEuuxcZWhat took them so long?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.
    Reply
  • Wolygon
    Aww but now I won't look leet when I'm changing the boot order in the BIOS.
    Reply
  • Silmarunya
    sonofliberty08so ... when will the ancient x86 be replace ?
    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.
    Reply
  • mauller07
    Very nice indeed, i would like to hope that they could update older boards with UEFI aswell that were released within the past few years as asus allows the use of bios or efi with some of their high end intel boards.

    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?
    Reply