BIOS will be dead in three years

[bill]

A sign of things to come, or wishful thinking?

BIOS will be dead in three years [thinq.co.uk]

It's the one major part of the PC that's still reminiscent of the PC's primordial, text-based beginnings, but the familiarly-clunky BIOS could soon be on its deathbed, according to MSI. The motherboard maker says it's now making a big shift towards point and click UEFI systems, and it's all going to kick off at the end of this year.

[Drag_Racer]

Looks to be just marketing rubbish from MSI.

Also makes me worry a bit. If you add a gui to this, then your running something with more possibility for errors and hijacking. Not to mention the fact that this is something you do not want the average pc owner messing with.

[J_RaD]

why does a BIOS need a point and click interface?

If you can't move around a bios you have no business being there.

[lammert]

My new HP notebook has a BIOS with GUI interface. Easier to navigate but you still need to know what you are doing. The BIOS is a place you shouldn't be visiting too often anyway.

The main difference between current BIOS implementations and UEFI is that most BIOS implementations still run in 16 bit mode with 1 MB addressing space. With current 64 bit processors that is old-fashioned. In the past the main concern has been price of Flash memory, but with current GByte flash memory prices it doesn't make much difference anymore if you use a small footprint 16 bit text implementation or a fancy GUI interface.

[SEOPeace]

Intel talked the same 10 years ago. Result: BIOS still here. :).

[bill]

This topic was trending on reddit today as well. Now they're saying that UEFI could take hold as early as next year. What are the chances of that actually happening?

New computers will 'boot up in seconds' [telegraph.co.uk]

BIOS technology has barely changed since the early days of mass computing, and the system struggles to cope with modern computing evolutions, such as USB-connected keyboards or flash drives.

UEFI is a more adaptable system, that can cope with keyboards and peripherals being connected to different ports, and which could also be used to support the next-generation of touch-screens and natural gesture interfaces.

Experts expect UEFI to start gaining a significant foothold in the computing market from as early as next year.

[enigma1]

If the UEFI specs are simple to implement then is possible to be adopted by h/w vendors; having a standard communication protocol in place not a bad a thing.

With traditional BIOS the difficulty is the engineer needs to go through each of the specs for the n/s bridges, peripherals etc customize the code in many cases, built it for each m/b model and so that takes time and requires a much higher level of expertise. If there is a standard communication protocol things will be easier but I think a min BIOS will still need to be in place. Because no matter what the likelihood of various peripheral revisions not working together is very high.