UEFI News and Commentary

Saturday, September 02, 2006

AMI Aptio & AMD

Pheww. AMI is sure putting out the press releases. This time, around supporting AMD. http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=159150. I suppose this is to balance out their other Intel press release (see my other post). Their drop in support is a nice accomplishment, although I can just imagine the level of hacking necessary to get it to work. But it kind of looks bad for AMD. I mean, you would expect that AMD would be out their touting their support for the new standards and, by the way, they can still plug into the old BIOS, too. Instead, they are still locked into supporting the same number of BIOS vendors as before. If I'm a BIOS customer and I get the supposedly Tiano compliant drivers, what's the advantage? I'm still locked into an AMI code base by license. The next bold step will be for AMD to publish their own drivers. Three out of the four commercial code bases support it (Phoenix hasn't announced any support for the Award code base). Still have to worry about the in-house BIOS teams at places like Dell, IBM, HP, tool. But with the PI standard rolling along, there'll be a lot of incentive for folks to move to the standard. And now, purchasing ATI, we'll really get another chip vendor support UEFI... Tim

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