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PC BIOS soon to be replaced by UEFI

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(PhysOrg.com) -- The 25 year old PC BIOS will soon be replaced by UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface) that will enable PC's to boot up in a matter of seconds. In 2011 we will start seeing UEFI dominate new PC's, according to BBC News.
UEFI is designed to be much more flexible than the old PC BIOS that dates back to some of the first IBM PC’s since 1979. The BIOS has not changed much in the past 25 years and is one of the main reasons why a PC’s boot-up time is over 25 seconds.
The original EFI specification was developed by Intel but has now evolved into a standard which is now known as UEFI. The UEFI forum, which is a non-profit corporation, is responsible for the management and promotion of the specification. Their goal is to replace the 25 year old BIOS that’s responsible for slow boot-ups.
Mark Doran, head of the UEFI Forum, is quoted as saying: "With UEFI we're getting it under a handful of seconds. In terms of boot speed, we're not at instant-on yet but it is already a lot better than conventional BIOS can manage, and we're getting closer to that every day."
Some PC manufactures have already started using UEFI and system administrators who oversee thousands of PC and servers have already seen the benefits of swapping old-fashioned Bios for UEFI.
 
Link to BBC article.

It sounds interesting but I hesitate to believe we'll be seeing a large amount of UEFI motherboards in 2011, at least for consumer hardware.
 
Is 25 second bootup time really a big deal? Windows 7 uses sleep mode so the pc is on in seconds. Wonder how having limited access to the bios with UEFI will affect or stop illegal copies of windows from beign used as on a Mac, its nearly impossible to get into the bios to tweak it.

Most of us don't even have motherboards that support usb 3.0, i suspect UEFI will be slow going before everyone uses it.
 
Booting up at home takes 30-45 seconds now. Not a big deal. The real problem is corporate PC's, with all of their garbage, that take 5-10 minutes to boot.
 
Cogman said:
ummmm... Boot up times aren't slow because the bios is slow.
Click to expand...

lol I thought the same thing when I read the article a few days back. On my purely average PC using some Gigabyte AM3 board (can't remember model right now), Bios is gone in a few seconds, hardly '25 seconds', more like 3-4 seconds at most. I don't have an SSD, so from the actual HDD bootup from ~3 seconds to desktop is about 25-30 seconds I think. Instant bios wouldn't shave more than 3-4 seconds off of my boot time with my physical HDD. Perhaps when SSDs get so damned fast that they can boot up in 1 second to a full OS this will be more exciting to me in terms of speed, although I'm sure this UEFI will have numerous other advantages (and maybe some potential drawbacks) compared to good old BIOS.
 
I boot my computer once a day. WTF cares if it takes 30 seconds? If this excites anyone that person is desperately in need of a life.
 
That's pretty cool. About time..

But I agree with others, I boot up once every couple of months... This won't make any significant difference.
 
My only experience with UEFI is on high end servers, and all I can say is that UEFI is slow. Takes some servers like 20 minutes to boot. I do not get why people are saying this is a good thing. I really do not see the advantage of it.
 
Cogman said:
ummmm... Boot up times aren't slow because the bios is slow.
Click to expand...
I was also wondering about that.

Now what does take awhile is the fact that my PC has multiple hard drive controllers, which all takes place before the OS even gets a shot at loading. It's got to go through the motherboard's native SATA controller, then the 6Gb/s SATA controller, then my RAID 5 controller. Each of the latter detections takes longer than the entire POST sequence.
Then after that, the OS bootup might take a minute or so once it finishes loading all my fun little background apps and tweaks. 🙂

Even so, my boot-time solution in the mornings is solved with the power-on timer in BIOS; and when I get home from work, I hit the power button, then go take care of a few other things, and walk back. Not a big problem, really.
 
Jeff7 said:
I was also wondering about that.

Now what does take awhile is the fact that my PC has multiple hard drive controllers, which all takes place before the OS even gets a shot at loading. It's got to go through the motherboard's native SATA controller, then the 6Gb/s SATA controller, then my RAID 5 controller. Each of the latter detections takes longer than the entire POST sequence.
Then after that, the OS bootup might take a minute or so once it finishes loading all my fun little background apps and tweaks. 🙂

Even so, my boot-time solution in the mornings is solved with the power-on timer in BIOS; and when I get home from work, I hit the power button, then go take care of a few other things, and walk back. Not a big problem, really.
Click to expand...

🙂 Well, I've heard it said a few times. for different components.

"2.0 Ghz, that would like turn on instantly!"
"8 Gigs of ram? That sould start really fast!"
"A new video card? That will make the system boot so much faster!"

All focusing on problems that, while they may be related, aren't the main cause of slowdowns. The main cause is that the hard drive is slow. Boot time is almost completely Dependant on HD speed. CPU can bottle neck it, as well as ram. but they certainly aren't the main causes of it.

The bios, however, is NOT something that really bottlenecks things. There are HUGE areas that the bios could be speed up, yet isn't. Why? Because it is fast enough.
 
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