The BIOS will soon be dead: Intel has announced plans to completely replace it with UEFI on all their chipsets by 2020. But what is UEFI, and how is it different from the BIOS ?
Both UEFI and BIOS are low-level software that starts when you boot your PC before booting your operating system, but UEFI is alot better .
What Is a BIOS?
BIOS is Basic Input-Output system. It’s low-level software that resides in a chip on your computer’s motherboard. The BIOS loads when your computer starts up, and the BIOS is responsible for waking up your computer’s hardware components, ensures they’re functioning properly, and then runs the bootloader that boots Windows or whatever other operating system you have installed.
When your computer boots—and after the POST (Power-On Self Test, before booting your operating system. It checks to ensure your hardware configuration is working properly). finishes the BIOS looks for a Master Boot Record, or MBR, stored on the boot device and uses it to launch the bootloader.
Why the BIOS Is Outdated
So BIOS is around from long time since 1980s
The traditional BIOS still has serious limitations.
- It can only boot from drives of 2.1 TB That limitation is due to the way the BIOS’s Master Boot Record system works.
- The BIOS must run in 16-bit processor mode, and only has 1 MB of space to execute in. It has trouble initializing multiple hardware devices at once,
- which leads to a slower boot process when initializing all the hardware interfaces and devices on a modern PC.
The BIOS has needed replacement for a long time. Intel started work on the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) specification back in 1998. Apple chose EFI when it switched to the Intel architecture on its Macs in 2006, but other PC manufacturers didn’t follow.
How UEFI better then bios BIOS
So here the UEFI Comes better GUI Interface better security and better performance and alot more now days almost every pc and laptops shipping with UEFI .
New UEFI firmware can boot drives larger then 2.1TB That’s because UEFI uses the GPT partitioning scheme instead of MBR. It also boots in a more standardized way, launching EFI executables rather than running code from a drive’s master boot record.
UEFI can run in 32-bit or 64-bit mode and has more addressable address space than BIOS, which means your boot process is faster.
UEFI has graphical and mouse courser support which makes managing devices and os easy although many laptop manufacturer still not giving GUI interface.
It also include secure boot which means the operating system can be checked for validity to ensure no malware has tampered with the boot process.
It’s not just a BIOS replacement, either. UEFI is essentially a tiny operating system that runs on top of the PC’s firmware, and it can do a lot more than a BIOS. It may be stored in flash memory on the motherboard, or it may be loaded from a hard drive or network share at boot.