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The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is meant to be an OS-Firmware interface, much like a standard BIOS is. This interface manages the PC boot and runtime services. It has been developed from the ground up, and thus should not be considered as an evolution to current existing BIOSes, which did not end up evolving much with current hardware. There were many limitations that led to its development; most importantly, the 16-bit processor mode and the maximum 1MB of addressable space deeply rooted into traditional BIOSes. This is because the original BIOS was designed off of the IBM 5150, equipped with an Intel 8088 processor. Heck, this 16-bit chip is now over 30 years old!
More recently, hard drive manufacturers have exceeded the 2.2TB size limitation of the Master Boot Record (MBR) partition scheme of our blue friends, so this also needed a replacement.
It all began in 1998 when Intel created the Boot Initiative (IBI) program, which eventually led to the release of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) version 1.10. Later in 2005, the Unified EFI Forum was formed as a non-profit industry-wide organization with the goal of promoting adoption and continuing the development of the specification, starting from what Intel had already developed. This forum board of directors includes representatives of many big players in the industry, such as AMD, American Megatrends, Apple, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and more. There is no cost associated for hardware vendors to implement the UEFI specification in their products. Today, UEFI is now at version 2.3.1, approved in April 2011.
So, to solve the addressable memory and processor mode limitations, the UEFI is made to support 32-bit and 64-bit mode. In 64-bit, it can access the entire memory of the computer. Additionally, as of version 2.3, there exists bindings for all of these architectures: ARM, Itanium, x86 and x86-64. As for the hard drive capacity limitation, the MBR was replaced with a Globally Unique Identifier Partition Table (GPT), allowing for capacities up to 8ZiB (Zebibyte that is). Considering such a unit is 1 billion times bigger than a Terrabyte, how long will it be before the new limit is reached? If the capacity is multiplied by a factor of 10 every 5 years, roughly, it should take approximately half a century. It's difficult to predict where computers will be in 2060, however. Maybe Moore's Law will come to an end at some point? Maybe the quantum computers will take over?
Another major difference with traditional BIOSes is the support for graphical menus and features. No user interface is defined in the UEFI specifications however, so it is up to the hardware vendor to implement one of their own. ASUS is one of the manufacturers to have done so. The result is called the "EZ Mode" of the UEFI BIOS. One important thing to note here is that it is still being referred to as a BIOS, which it is clearly not, but for the the average consumer it is going to cause much less confusion. So from now on, it's going to simply be called an UEFI. In the next page, Neoseeker is going to take a look at ASUS' particular implementation.
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My x58 board takes 23 seconds from power on to BIOS password, and then 6 seconds to Windows password.
If I could get the BIOS/UEFI loaded faster I'd be happy.
So Carl, what's the device recognition speed like???
vs a BIOS?
Speed test please.
To do that I would need to have a board which I can flash to a standard BIOS or an UEFI. The ones I have are the ASUS E35M1 which do not have any BIOS implementation.
For your X58 board however, you might want to disable the dedicated controllers you don't use via the BIOS. If disabled, they won't have to be initialized. An example would be an extra SATA/IDE controller. Setting your southbridge to RAID mode also adds some delay. If you don't have RAID arrays, set it to AHCI instead.
Heh, Zebibytes/yobibytes XD
It's about time they moved on. I can certainly see this catching on, actually. It's the sort of feature that the average user won't even realize is there, and the rest of us who actually have cause to use it will find the update satisfying.
I have 2 video cards + PCI-E audio + RAID0 + Bluray + AHCI HD
I've disabled the other RAID card, and USB3.
Subjectively speaking... is UEFI faster to initialize and identify system devices?
I timed my bootup again... 27 seconds from power on to BIOS PW, then 8 seconds to Win7 x64 Logon.
MB: Asus P6X58D P
Thanks.
According to Adaptec's Knowledgebase at: http://ask.adaptec.com/scripts/adaptec_tic.cfg/php.exe/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=17087&p_created=1305289854&p_sid=Bwh4Y1Dk&p_accessibility=0&p_redirect=&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPSZwX3NvcnRfYnk9JnBfZ3JpZHNvcnQ9JnBfcm93X2NudD0yNDkxLDI0OTEmcF9wcm9kcz0mcF9jYXRzPSZwX3B2PSZwX2N2PSZwX3NlYXJjaF90eXBlPWFuc3dlcnMuc2VhcmNoX25sJnBfcGFnZT0x&p_li=&p_topview=1 none of Adaptec's controllers are UEFI compliant! It is interesting that even though Adaptec surely knew about the new type of BIOS coming out for some time, that they still, according to their Knowledgebase article, do not have any compliant controllers.
I did find though, interestingly, that Adaptec's 2405 RAID card will work on the motherboard. Now, Adaptec is supposed to be attempting to find out why the 5805 doesn't work and the 2405 does. I hope they find out and can implement a fix soon!
I work on computers as a tech 40 hours a week and the asus & asrock and the like, the bios gui are useless garbage.
The first ever version of windows ~ first ever apple gui are better, Hell even the first gui xerox pumped out is probably better.
The asus eufi bios besides the other problems of possibly trying to block other os from running ~ installing and being a joke for other apps to hack peeks cpu use for no reason , first ever windows gui can run off a 12mgz cpu and one meg of main system ram.
Just try and click on something and its a glitch fest, that and options are miss-categorized and lets not forget the broken cHina-shEnGlieh, All your base are belong to us.
Its not better its worse and made for people that don’t know how to work a bios and for people like that they shouldn't be in the bios in the first place and don’t even get me started about the bios auto overclock topic or should I say auto suicide option.
Normal stile of gpi I can work it 10x faster then a UEFI bios.
And yes im all for a face lift to the old stile bios but man a 16 year old with 3 years of computer science in high school could do better and im guessing the EUFI bios on the asus mobo was made my monkeys.
Personally, I do like the new UEFI from ASUS, for the very reaons explained in the article, and as much as it may surprise you, no incentive is being distributed with review requests.
Have you played with the implementations of other manufacturers such as the Gigabyte 3D BIOS? The MSI Click BIOS?
Being able to use the mouse is a nice feature, but not necessary. Having the option to use the mouse never hurts.
And so what if it has auto overclocking features? If one doesn't like them, one doesn't have to use them.
I want to overclock DDR3-RAM from 1866 to 2000-2133 MHz.
I will also overclock CPU and GPU, but only some MHz.
And therefore 1 information, very important, which I was unable to find in manual or reviews:
Does the Asus F1A75-V Pro also support a GPU clock-divider or a separate setting-option for the GPU clock in BIOS?
It would be great, if you could answer this question.
Have a look at our A75 motherboard roundup recently published. On the page about overclocking, you will see a screenshot with the GPU divider decreased to 4.5 instead of the stock 6, so yeah the ASUS boards have that setting, and lots more. Along with the reference clock increase, that gave 976MHz. Take a peek at the performance in the following pages, it's quite impressive.
Good luck with your build!
Big thanks for your quick reply.
I'm definitely gonna buy the Asus A75 mainboard.
I don't go for aggressive overlclocking CPU and GPU, but for RAM. RAM is the bottle-neck at APUs, especially at the ones with powerful GPU units.
Thanks again and best from Austria.
i really dont care how the settings are organized, how the UI looks, etc., i just care about the actual settings youre giving me to play around with, and his mobo has a lot of settings juicy settings (e.g. individual system fan profiles).
Even for a tech, it just makes sense because it streamlines most of the options in a better interface and it gives a lot more descriptions about its components than the old BIOS, which is a nice feature even for an expert.
Again, one could make the argument that its not perfect...but then again...what is...or...who is for that matter?...
We'll always find new ways to improve things as the years come and go. That's what keeps driving ingenuity and the need to keep moving forward.
I agree that they could organize the interface a lot better, include more comprehensive descriptions and use less resources but for the sake of saving time and being more accessible to the average user, it just makes sense.
And who knows, maybe tweaks that follow in the years to come will take into account these factors that are obviously a concern to many...