Summary
- A consortium of Chinese giants, including Huawei, developed UBIOS, a new firmware standard that replaces UEFI.
- The system promises to improve support for chiplets, heterogeneous computing and ARM, RISC-V and LoongArch CPUs.
- The objective is to create an independent technological ecosystem, but details will be presented in November.
The Global Computing Consortium (GCC), a consortium of Chinese companies led by giants such as Huawei, announced a new firmware standard for computers: the so-called UBIOS, or Unified Basic Input-Output System.
According to the portal Fast Technologythe new system was rebuilt from scratch, building on the original BIOS but deliberately avoiding UEFI, which dominates modern computers.
The new alternative was developed by 13 Chinese companies, including Huawei, China Electronics Standardization Institute (CESI), Byosoft and Kunlun Tech. This is the first standardized and scalable firmware in the country.
The GCC is expected to present more details about UBIOS at the Global Computing Conference in the city of Shenzen in November. It remains to be seen whether the industry will widely adopt the new standard or remain restricted, as happened with the LoongArch system.
Why a new standard?
The initiative is part of China’s effort to develop an independent ecosystem of technologies controlled by the United States, such as the popular UEFI. According to the consortium, the decision to avoid UEFI from the original BIOS was technical and strategic. The group claims that UEFI and its reference implementation (Intel’s TianoCore EDK II) have become complex.
In this sense, UBIOS promises advantages, such as better native support for “chiplets” (chip design such as Intel’s recently announced Panther Lake line) and heterogeneous computing — for example, motherboards with multiple different processors, something that UEFI has difficulty managing.
Furthermore, the consortium designed the new standard to better support CPU architectures other than x86 (from Intel and AMD), such as ARM, RISC-V and LoongArch, the latter being the main one of Chinese origin.
China seeks technological independence
For the computer to function, it needs basic software that “wakes up” and identifies the hardware (processor, memory, storage…) and delivers it to the operating system (such as Windows or Linux). This software is called motherboard firmware.
For decades, we have used the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System). However, it became obsolete and was replaced by UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), a more modern and flexible standard.
The problem to be resolved, from the Chinese consortium’s point of view, is that American companies such as Intel and AMD largely dominate the UEFI working group.
Source: https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/china-cria-substituta-para-bios-do-computador/
