What's UEFI, and Should You Care?

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
As Intel prepares to launch its Sandy Bridge microarchitecture next month, we're all preparing to see what it's going to bring to the table in terms of features and performance. On the platform side of things though, there's going to be something else to look out for... UEFI, also known as the BIOS replacement.


Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
PLEASE refrain from using such large fonts. That URL has stretched the forum ;-)

There are a couple of reasons Apple had UEFI options long before others. The first is that it's Intel backed, and when Apple made the Intel move, adopting UEFI was a no-brainer. On the PC side of things, Intel has been using UEFI on its motherboards for a while. The solutions just haven't been near as elegant as what we'll be seeing in the months ahead.

The other reason is due to Apple having full control over its platform. Apple is the one that handles the configuration of the computers it sells, not the consumer. As a result, deploying UEFI wasn't exactly too difficult, and there was no reason at all that Apple should have stuck with the BIOS route.

On the PC desktop side, things are different. It's difficult to coordinate with the mass of hardware vendors in order to get UEFI implemented, though I do admit it took far too long.

That said, I'm not quite sure what UEFI looks like on Apple, but I'm confident that these upcoming solutions are going to blow whatever it is away ;-)
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Man, the boost times with UEFI are just impressive!

I would kill to have a UEFI ASUS board with an overclocked 2500K, because I'd pair it with any Sandforce SSD just to test how fast it would boot with an appropriately configured Bios. I bet it won't be very long before it is possible to see Windows 7 cold boot in 15 seconds, and warm boot in less than 10 with the right configurations...
 
Top