goodbye BIOS: first EFI-enabled motherboard soon after Vista SP1

[xbit-labs] MicroStar International (MSI), one of the world’s largest makers of computer mainboards and other components, plans to start transition to Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) in February of 2008. It is unclear how long the transition takes, but once it kicks off, there will hardly be a way back to Basic Input Output System (BIOS) used today.

The first mainboard from MSI for the channel market to use EFI will be P35 Neo3, which is powered by Intel P35 core-logic and supports Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel Core 2 Quad, Intel Core 2 Extreme as well as various other LGA775 central processing units (CPUs). According to a news-story by HKEPC web-site, MSI P35 Neo 3’s EFI will support several languages and more precise system settings for tweaking. In order to further popularize EFI, MSI reportedly even embedded three simplistic games into EFI to allow users to play them while the operating system is loaded by the PC.

since the MB has been announced for february we can be pretty sure that Vista SP1 will be released soon.

now we just need PS/2, serial/parallel ports, analog audio jacks, VGA/DVI ports, IDE (including floppy), PCI slots, game ports and the stupid 24pin PSU and IDE/SATA power connectors to disappear. I'm sick of having half the space of motherboard front panels being wasted by ports nobody uses anymore and my desktop PC full of power cables everywhere [C].

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop wrote:



[xbit-labs] MicroStar International (MSI), one of the world’s largest makers of computer mainboards and other components, plans to start transition to Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) in February of 2008. It is unclear how long the transition takes, but once it kicks off, there will hardly be a way back to Basic Input Output System (BIOS) used today.

The first mainboard from MSI for the channel market to use EFI will be P35 Neo3, which is powered by Intel P35 core-logic and supports Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel Core 2 Quad, Intel Core 2 Extreme as well as various other LGA775 central processing units (CPUs). According to a news-story by HKEPC web-site, MSI P35 Neo 3’s EFI will support several languages and more precise system settings for tweaking. In order to further popularize EFI, MSI reportedly even embedded three simplistic games into EFI to allow users to play them while the operating system is loaded by the PC.

since the MB has been announced for february we can be pretty sure that Vista SP1 will be released soon.

now we just need PS/2, serial/parallel ports, analog audio jacks, VGA/DVI ports, IDE (including floppy), PCI slots, game ports and the stupid 24pin PSU connectors to disappear. I'm sick of having half the space of motherboard front panels being wasted by ports nobody uses anymore.

First?  My laptop has one   Does this mean Windows supports EFI with SP1??

nightski wrote:


First?  My laptop has one

then your laptop is not a PC but a Mac

nightski wrote:


 Does this mean Windows supports EFI with SP1??

yes it does

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop wrote:



then your laptop is not a PC but a Mac

Correct, but I primarily run Vista.  This is really good news.  Hopefully this means I can mess with my parititions without having to reformat every time due to the boot camp efi->bios hack.

UEFI Support and Requirements

Windows Server 2008 fully supports UEFI, and Windows Vista SP1 adds that UEFI support to the 64-bit version of Windows Vista.

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop wrote:



nightski wrote:  First?  My laptop has one

then your laptop is not a PC but a Mac

Then it is still a PC ... just doesn't come with Windows installed.

Vasudev wrote:



UEFI Support and Requirements

Windows Server 2008 fully supports UEFI, and Windows Vista SP1 adds that UEFI support to the 64-bit version of Windows Vista.

no support for the 32bit version? nightski'd better add 2gb of ram to his macbook if he wants it to survive the 64bit upgrade.

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop wrote:



Vasudev wrote:  UEFI Support and Requirements Windows Server 2008 fully supports UEFI, and Windows Vista SP1 adds that UEFI support to the 64-bit version of Windows Vista.

no support for the 32bit version? nightski'd better add 2gb of ram to his macbook if he wants it to survive the 64bit upgrade.

Yea I will have to go to 4gb.  Its cheap.  There are a few other issues though, like boot camp not supporting 64 bit.  However, just today there was news of a 64bit version of boot camp coming with the leopard 10.5.2 update (possibly).

Hopefully that is true.  If it all falls in place and I can use EFI + 64 bit + Vista SP1 I will be very happy