During our tests of the Solid State Drive technology we have been testing the boot times of Windows 7 with different harddrives and it became painfully obvious that the modern PC has one gigantic bottleneck, the BIOS. With our test system it took 24 seconds before the first part of the booting process was over and Windows could start loading. This is without any extra RAID controller card or such that require extra time to be registered.
Phoenix has demonstrated UEFI, Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, that is said to replace the traditional BIOS in the near future. Unlike regular BIOS that in best case scenario takes ten to twenty seconds to boot, UEFI does it in less than 1 second.
Phoenix UEFI presentation from IDF is available at Engadget and certainly looks like the dream for SSD PCs. A notebook Lenovo T400 loaded Windows 7 in less than 10 seconds, although a stripped down version, but it’s still impressive. Apple already uses EFI with its Intel-based Macs and hopefully PCs won’t be behind for much longer.
