BIOS chip capacity limitation

[hennessy1]

I was wondering since we can have 32GB of storage at the size of a fingernail why can't they increase the size of data a BIOS chip can hold? I know that for EVGA they had to remove the start up logo because of size constraints not that that is a determining factor to increase the size but the principle of it. I might be overlooking something here as to why they can't but please correct me if I am wrong.

 

[frostedflakes]

AFAIK there's no limitation. There's just absolutely no reason for BIOS chips to be that large. Plus the cost would be significantly higher. My Gigabyte AM2+ board has a pretty feature-rich BIOS and it's only 1MB (8Mbit). I think one of the Socket 462 boards I used years ago had either a 2Mbit or 4Mbit flash ROM. They're getting bigger as more features and functionality are added, but not that much bigger.

 

[hennessy1]

That's true no reason to pay a premium for just a larger BIOS chip.

 

[SonicIce]

also maybe they are EEPROM not flash but I'm not sure

 

[Idontcare]

If I can get 1GB flash card for my digital camera for $2 at Staples (that's retail w/full markup) I sure as heck would not expect a 16Mbit (!, not giga folks, just mega, as if it were the 90's) BIOS chip to be a significant cost adder to my $200 mobo over that of the existing cost structure of a 1Mbit Bios.

Now it could be a real capacity limit brought on by entirely arbitrary reasons such as using a silly castrated 12bit address controller for the BIOS or some other absurdly legacy relic of the late seventies.

 

[Emulex]

back in the days the speed of the bios rom affected everything since calls to the bios to execute things (int13 etc) made a huge difference.

 

[Sylvanas]

So, why exactly do we need a bigger BIOS chip? It's purpose is to initialise CPU/mobo/Voltage parameters on start-up and provide an interface to change these variables. BIOS does that now and has done for years...Asus/MSI have that mini OS thing that you can use without logging into windows but I don't see that as practical or useful to many people.

 

[pcgeek11]

So, why exactly do we need a bigger BIOS chip? It's purpose is to initialise CPU/mobo/Voltage parameters on start-up and provide an interface to change these variables. BIOS does that now and has done for years...Asus/MSI have that mini OS thing that you can use without logging into windows but I don't see that as practical or useful to many people.

I don't think the "mini-OS thing" is on the BIOS chip but is held on a separate chip that is a bootable Linux OS. I have one and it is great fast ( boots in about 5 seconds ) and as safe as you can get for antivirus. It doesn't allow writes to the hard disk only a USB thumb drive. E-Mail, Web, Photos etc.

 

[epidemis]

Why can't we skip the bios entirely? I'm somewhat disappointing that noone had made load time a priority yet.