http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11430069

Well, all I can say as an IT Technician, is :

It's about *BLEEEEEEEEEEEEP*ing time ^_^

UEFI is based on an Intel design...sounds kinky. Least they're not putting hard limits into it like with BIOS,

Downside : Back to college for more learning :(

Good fecking riddance.

It's amazing it lasted as long as it has. I suppose that's the problem with there being no real competition in the personal computer market (even Macs are now just PCs with Mac OS on them after all). Hopefully now we'll see rapid development of motherboard technology as it has long struck me as lagging behind.

This could be fantastic, but I expect there will be teething trouble. It'll most likely take them a couple of years to iron out all the kinks. It's excellent news though.

I don't find that article realistic unfortunately; this is a technology that's been available for the last 5 years and is in a great form for adoption since 2007. The problem is that it costs more to implement it than standard BIOS and most motherboard manufacturers don't see any advantage to it.

Couple this with the fact that older OSs (prior to Windows Vista) can't boot from EFI (without it having another layer that emulates the BIOS and makes it even more expensive) and the fact that most of those PCs still running XP are corporate (which means high volume sales) adds another downside to the tech.

With this and the eventual increase of how common and affordable Solid State drives are, we might get a new take on Moore's Law.

That limit of 640KB base memory has been hindering software for years. Even as early as the 1990s. Remember all those copies of Autoexec.bat you had for each game/software, to try to scrimp another 5kb into it? O_o

Moving almost everything into himem.sys and similar.

Mainboard producers aren't really going to have much choice. Hard drives are fast approaching the BIOS limit, and something will have to be done about it, or machines will become server-like with as many 2TB drives they can fit in, (4 or 5), instead of 1 or 2 5TB, 10TB, 100TB drives.

UEFI is just a giant pile of shit. My Acer BIOS won't let me change a fucking nothing. If this is the future of BIOS, I prefer the past.

Luckily the old BIOS compatibility layer won't disappear any time soon, imho. Even the industry will be forced to adapt this shit just because the original BIOS can't support larger hard drives.

BIOS has been around almost forever. It has all sorts of annoying limitations, but we live with it to keep BIOS around for compatibility's sake. But virtually no programs interact with BIOS anymore. There hasn't been any compelling reason to stick with BIOS for a long time. It's just that changing to something else takes so much effort, and we have yet to see a critical mass of people take the plunge. It will happen eventually, out of necessity.

Personally, I like the way that coreboot is going.

That was a bloody artform that! I managed to get something like 620k free to play one of the falcon games and still had mouse & sound support

UEFI implementations are currently broken seriously broken at that. There are also what 5 MB's out there that use it and all are Intel chips. UEFI won't move anywhere till someone other than Apple decides to use it. Vista SP1 base vista won't even boot on UEFI

HURRAY!!! Now we get to boot an OS (EFI) just to boot our OS! ;)

"Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated” -BIOS

This is just a power move by Intel.

Sounds good to me. I'm always up for trying something new.

Well, it should be a UEFI partition, some sort of loader :-P

Will my GOGs run with this?

This has no impact on GOG games. The only games that interact with BIOS run on DOSBox instead, and DOSBox has its own implementation of BIOS (well, the API part of BIOS at least, since that's all they need).