UEFI, BIOS, GPT, MBR – What’s the Difference?
UEFI stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. It is the logical successor to the EFI, which is the Extensible Firmware Interface . During the mid-90s, Intel realized that the IBM BIOS ( Basic Input/Output System ) style firmware interface had inherent limitations. These limitations didn’t affect the average user, but they made it difficult to produce high-performance servers, namely the Itanium-based products. As a result, Intel started developing the EFI specification in 1998. In 2005, Intel ceased development of the EFI specification and contributed it to the Unified EFI Forum while maintaining ownership. Intel continues to license the EFI specification to vendors today, but the UEFI specification is owned by the Forum. The advantages of UEFI over BIOS are numerous, to say the least, but some of the more notable ones are: A powerful pre-boot environment capable of running applications Modular design CPU-independent architecture (Itanium, x86, x8...