What is UEFI or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface?

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UEFI is the acronym for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. It is basically a replacement for BIOS which is used to set upward the hardware and load and start an operating organization in today'due south Windows x/8 PCs.

What is UEFI

The antecedent of UEFI was developed past Intel for its Itanium based servers. The main limitation of BIOS was that it was a 16-fleck with only 1 MB of addressable space and utilized the Main Kick Record (MBR) partition scheme. Thus there were constraints on the amount of RAM that could be used by BIOS, and information technology couldn't back up an HDD with a capacity of above 2.2TB. In order to overcome these limitations, Intel introduced the Intel Boot Initiative which was later renamed as EFI. Information technology was then taken over by the Unified EFI Forum, which evolved information technology into UEFI.

The original EFI interface is used in Macs and but supports Intel processors. But UEFI, on the other mitt, supports both Intel and AMD processors.

Read: UEFI vs BIOS

Advantages of UEFI

UEFI supports both 32-fleck and 64-chip compages. Thus information technology tin utilize more RAM to do more circuitous processes than BIOS. UEFI besides supports CPU independent architecture and drivers.

Unlike BIOS, UEFI tin have a more visually pleasing interface that supports a mouse. See the Asus UEFI interface below.

Apart from the standard MBR segmentation scheme, UEFI also supports GUID Division Table or GPT. GPT allows for a maximum deejay and partition size of 9.4 ZB (compared to 2.2TB of MBR) and 128 partitions on Windows (compared to iv of MBR).

UEFI comes with a kick director which removes the needs for a split up kick loader. UEFI also supports extensions such every bit ACPI that are not 16-bit. Also, UEFI also gives y'all faster beginning-ups and better networking support.

With the advocacy in the hardware industry, BIOS is condign more and more insufficient to handle the power and capacities of today'due south machines and UEFI has the capability to handle our ever-growing thirst for more calculating ability at least for the next two decades.

Read: Cull UEFI or Legacy BIOS when booting into Windows Setup or Windows PE.

In general, UEFI-enabled machines have faster startup and shutdown times as compared to BIOS-based machines. Here is a list of Windows 10 features that requires UEFI:

Secure Boot protects Windows 10 pre-boot process against bootkit and other malware attacks.
Early Launch Anti-malware (ELAM) commuter gets loaded past Secure Boot first and checks all non-Microsoft drivers before they are loaded.
Windows Trusted Boot protects the kernel and system drivers during launch.
Measured Kick will measure components from firmware till the kick-start drivers & stores these measurements in the TPM chip.
Device Guard uses CPU virtualization and TPM back up to support Device Guard with AppLocker, and Device Baby-sit with Credential Guard.
Credential Guard works with Device Guard and uses CPU virtualization and TPM support to protect security information like NTLM hashes, etc.
BitLocker Network Unlock will automatically unlock Windows 10 at reboot when continued to a corporate network.
GUID Partition Table or GPT deejay partitioning is required to enable large kick disks.

Hopefully, more manufacturers will switch to UEFI from BIOS.

Related reads:

Check if your PC supports UEFI or BIOS
Recover or set a BIOS or UEFI Password for Windows computers
How to access UEFI Firmware settings
Manage EFI/UEFI boot options with EasyUEFI.

Currently pursuing Bachelors in Electronics, the author Nithin Ramesh is a technology blogger. Apart from technology his other interests include cricket and rock music.