Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Why Intel Wants BIOS Dead

Posted by timothy on from the because-bios-stole-its-harley dept.

An anonymous reader writes "This brief, readable whitepaper by Brian Richardson, a product manager at BIOS-vendor AMI, examines the history of BIOS firmware and explains why chipmaker Intel has invested much time and effort to create and promote a firmware framework to replace BIOS. Why would a chip company care about firmware? Read Richardson's paper about the 'Evolution of BIOS: EFI, the Framework, and beyond' to find out."

2 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. For the lazy... by avalys · · Score: 5, Informative

    For those too lazy to read the article, it basically says Intel wants to drop the current-generation BIOS because it requires backward-compatibility. For instance, when designing the Itanium, they didn't want to have to make their fancy-schmancy 64-bit processor emulate a 16-bit 8mhz CPU simply for the sake of the BIOS.

    Note that, despite the hyperbolized title of the Slashdot summary, Intel doesn't want the BIOS dead. They don't have any problem with the concept of a BIOS, they just want the current firmware standard to evolve to better meet the needs of today's technology.

    --
    This space intentionally left blank.
  2. Re:OpenFirmware by oxygene2k2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    OpenFirmware is standard of 300 pages.. EFI is 3000 pages, I think..

    also, intel claims that it took them "hundreds of man years" to do EFI, while it took a friend of mine and me (basically) the spare time of about 1.5 years to implement most of OF.

    see http://www.openbios.org/. (and yes, we're to busy to update the website)