You know how sometimes the huge significance of a change is obvious in an instant? That’s how I met the news, submitted by not one but two readers almost simultaneously, that the ancient stinking corpse of the PC BIOS is finally going to be buried.
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface.
Remember that term, UEFI for short. I’ll let the BBC article at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11430069 provide the details of the “general public” information. As IT people, we’re going to be dealing with some very interesting advantages.
Hard drives will no longer be limited to 2 TB.
Boot time will be reduced enormously.
Ancient device interfaces like PS2, which still controls even USB mice, finally go away.
The Programmable Interrupt Controller can at last stop finegling 16 real interrupts into the far more virtual interrupts a contemporary PC requires.
And ho boy does this look like a hot idea for devices using flash hard drives. You wouldn’t need a hot, fast processor to get blistering performance from, for instance, word processing applications.
Watch for it coming soon, as in new PCs starting in 2011. I can hardly wait.