The life and times of the modern motherboard

Posted at: Tuesday 27th November 2007 by Alex Watson

Ever wondered how a motherboard and its BIOS are designed and made? What makes one a brilliant overclocker and another as stable as a plate of jelly on a bouncy castle? Alex Watson investigates.

Look ahead

As operating systems have developed, the BIOS has seen its original functions eroded - in the DOS days, it even handled I/O requests - but it has hung on, and despite having its roots in the 1980s, it has, thanks in no small part to Taiwan's BIOS engineers, continued to be useful. Power saving and thermal management features are now implemented in the BIOS, and without the BIOS, it's doubtful if overclocking would exist in anything like the meaningful way it does today. Of course, Intel and other companies plan to replace the BIOS with a more up-to-date system, known as EFI, the Extensible Firmware Interface. EFI's improvements include a basic set of device drivers, which would allow components such as network cards to function before OS-level drivers load, along with support for a basic OS-style shell environment. However, EFI hasn't gained support quickly - aside from Intel using it for Itanium systems, its biggest adopter has been Apple, which uses EFI in all its new Intel-based machines.

On the PC side, it seems unlikely that EFI will supplant the BIOS any time soon. While the IA-64 version of Windows 2000 and XP 64-bit Microsoft produced for use with Itanium systems supported EFI, regular XP and Vista don't officially support it yet, due in part to the lack of hardware support on the PC side.

While EFI may eventually replace the BIOS, the fact that it's progressing so slowly is, in part, testament to the remarkable flexibility of the BIOS. Together with hardware design, the BIOS continues to offer more and more features for the PC enthusiast, and the motherboard continues to live up to its name: it's the component that has the biggest influence over how your computer lives, works and performs.