The transition to extensible firmware interface (EFI) from the widely adopted basic input/output system (BIOS) has begun with the release of Intel-based Macintosh computers, however, in the general personal computers EFI is still not used any broadly. However, this is going to change with the release of Intel Corp.’s next-generation mobile platform code-named Santa Rosa, which will use EFI instead of BIOS.

American Megatrends Inc. (AMI), a leading supplier of BIOS, announced at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in Beijing, China, that Santa Rosa, Intel’s next generation Centrino mobile technology, will be the first of many future customer reference boards (CRBs) from Intel mobile platform group to offer Aptio, an EFI 1.1/UEFI-based firmware.

AMI Aptio is compatible with EFI 1.10, Unified EFI (UEFI) standards, and the Intel platform innovation framework for EFI which is Intel’s “product-strength implementation of EFI and UEFI”. Aptio offers a wide set of mobile features, such as enhanced embedded controller interface, digital thermal sensors, hot key support and quick boot. Aptio also supports the latest advanced mobile features of Intel’s next generation mobile chipsets, including innovative power saving technologies, advanced display options and dual-core processors.

UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is a specification detailing an interface that helps hand off control of the system for the pre-boot environment (i.e.: after the system is powered on, but before the operating system starts) to an operating system, such as Windows or Linux. UEFI provides a “clean” interface between operating systems and platform firmware at boot time, and also supports an architecture-independent mechanism for initializing add-in cards. EFI and UEFI are set to replace BIOS in future computers.

Intel’s code-named Santa Rosa mobile platform will feature code-named Merom processor with 800MHz processor system bus, new core-logic code-named Crestline which incarnations sport DirectX 9.0 shader model 3.0-compatible built-in graphics core, Intel NAND technology that boosts performance of hard disk drives, code-named Kedron wireless network controller compliant with an 802.11n standard, which will increase bandwidth to up to 600Mb/s, and some other innovations.