New computers will boot in seconds--25 year old BIOS technology on the way out

[synergy]

New computers will ‘boot up in seconds' - Telegraph

BIOS technology, which has been used to boot up computers since 1979, was never designed to last as long as it has, and is one of the reasons modern computers take so long to get up and running.

By contrast, UEFI – which stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface – has been built to meet modern computing needs, and will soon be the pre-eminent technology in many new computers, enabling them to go from ‘off' to ‘on' in seconds.

Hopefully there will be better support for components, overclocking, and other non-OS specific functions too. It seems like they've been talking about this forever though. When you think about it, it really is amazing that we're still running on BIOS tech.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

You will always have some wait times, and as is, waiting for POST and the start up process is only a few seconds, once everything get's passed onto the OS it tends to take a long time to boot.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

You will always have some wait times, and as is, waiting for POST and the start up process is only a few seconds, once everything get's passed onto the OS it tends to take a long time to boot.

A decent SSD takes care of that problem. I would say the boot up time on my system is roughly split between BIOS and Windows 7

 

[synergy]

A decent SSD takes care of that problem. I would say the boot up time on my system is roughly split between BIOS and Windows 7

I would agree. Once you see the desktop with an SSD you're ready to go, but the actual loading of the OS is around 10 seconds or so. For me the BIOS is easily that much or more.

 

[Slaymate]

I just shut my system down and timed each phase with my stopwatch

0 sec. > press power button
13 sec. > Beeps
18 sec. > cpu, memory, drives, controllers detected. Windows starts to load.
30 sec. > Wallpaper loads
36 sec. > Idles, all startup programs loaded.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

So it is about 50/50 with an SSD, the thing is, we won't start seeing SSD's in regular factory computers for awhile due to costs.

 

[PP Mguire]

All depends on the board and bios you have. On quick boot mine takes less than 5 seconds to shoot through post.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

Depends on what options you have enabled in the BIOS too. E.g. I have a jmicron controller thing for my Sata 6Gbps ports, that increases wait time by at least 5 seconds.

 

[PP Mguire]

Yea but thats also not part of the bios

 

[Slaymate]

Yea but thats also not part of the bios

The controller is is detected by the bios to determine it's mode so it is part of the bios. If you disable the controller in the bios then the screen doesn't show up. If you enable it, then it does load. Sounds like it's part of the bios to me.