Intel says the PC BIOS will be replaced with 'EFI'

[Bob Bell]

On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 11:13:09AM -0500, bscott at ntisys.com <bscott at ntisys.com> wrote:
> http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2130826,00.html

    I honestly don't think this is huge news.  Intel's use of EFI on
Itanium architecture has been going on for some time.  EFI has it's good
point and bad; ideally, open firmware is a good thing to have, though
the EFI has some funky implementation details, such as a FAT32 partition
with a funky size calculation (1% of disk, 100 MB to 1 GB, I think, but
it's been a while since I looked at this).  Overall, much better than
BIOS, although I've always thought of it as a competitor to the firmware
of Sun, DEC, HP, & IBM servers, not PC BIOS.

    Of course, the big news would be if Intel was making a concerted
effort to get rid of PC BIOS and use EFI on IA-32 machines.  Such a task
would probably take a strong push from Intel.  However, that's not the
vibe that a got from the article.  Instead, the article seemed to
indicate that IA-32 implementations had only been prototyped, and
Intel's comment that they aren't in the BIOS business seemed to indicate
to be that they may not been pushing for this too hard -- after all, if
IA-32 PC's are stuck with BIOS, that's one more differentiator for IPF,
right?

    BTW, Intel has infomration on EFI at
http://www.intel.com/technology/efi/.

-- 
Bob Bell <bobbell at zk3.dec.com>
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