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BIOS chip capacity limitation

H

hennessy1

Golden Member
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
Sylvanas said:
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.
Click to expand...

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