Intel will stop supporting older BIOS technology in modern chipsets for client and servers by 2020, and stated that the products will only be supported by UEFI Class 3 or higher versions.
This news comes from Brian Richardson, Intel's top engineer, also known as the "BIOS guy".
According to Richardson, Intel has already started a process it calls "UEFI Last Mile", and it's an attempt to remove the old code from its products to focus on newer technologies such as UEFI.
This mainly means removing the BIOS.
Speaking at the UEFI Plugfest, a conference hosted by the UEFI Forum, Richardson outlined the top three reasons why Intel is leaving the BIOS (page 10 of the PDF presentation):
- Security risks - The BIOS does not support standards for secure boot or code signing.
- Backward compatibility The new technologies that will be released will not need to have BIOS compatibility.
- Complications in code validation - The BIOS requires two validation paths (CSM ON & CSM OFF).
The BIOS, which comes from the Basic Input / Output System, is a firmware package that is included in the motheboards and contains the code needed to boot hardware and boot the system.
BIOS was released in 1981 and was replaced in the 90s by UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), a more general standard that can work on more computer architectures and were not natively tied to the 16-bit mode of Intel x86 processors as BIOS is.
Of course the new UEFI standard is superior to the old BIOS. It provides faster boot speeds, improved security, expanded configuration options and a universal architecture that supports a variety of hardware architectures.
All modern motherboards support one of the standard versions of UEFI and modern operating systems have long supported UEFI (since the early 2000s).
Nevertheless, many users still choose the BIOS. The main reasons are the errors they encounter when allowing them to boot through UEFI, which in some cases prevents users from fully using their computers.
Richardson, of course, acknowledged the UEFI usability issues in his presentation and said that Intel would work to resolve these issues and enable UEFI to have a much smoother function even for novice users.
