AMIBIOS 8

AMIBIOS 8 (internally codenamed BigBIOS, alternatively spelled "Big BIOS") is a version of AMIBIOS developed by American Megatrends and released on October 24, 2001. It was the last commercial version of AMIBIOS, succeeding AMIBIOS 07.00T (also known as AMIBIOS 07.00.10). However, it was not widely used used until 2003, when the Intel 865 series of chipsets (codenamed Springdale) were released. Despite this, it was a very popular BIOS at its peak, being used on many motherboards released between 2003 and 2011. Because of this, it was also a serious competitor to other BIOSes released during this era, such as AwardBIOS v6.00PG.

It was most commonly used on Intel chipset based ASUS motherboards released in that era, but was also used by many other manufacturers, including:

• ASRock
• Biostar
• Colorful
• ECS Elitegroup/PC Chips
• Foxconn
• GIGABYTE (mainly on some server motherboards)
• MSI (Micro-Star International)
• Supermicro

It was replaced in 2005 by Aptio, a UEFI firmware developed by the same company. However, many manufacturers continued to use it until 2011, when AMI stopped licensing it for Intel's 6-series chipsets in favor of Aptio. The last chipsets with AMIBIOS 8 were the H55, H57 and Q57 chipsets for Intel processors and the AMD 970 chipset (specifically with the SB950 southbridge) for AMD processors, the latter only seen on the Maxsun MS-A970 Pro. Most systems based on Vortex86 SoCs, some of which were released after 2011, also use AMIBIOS 8.

Development

AMIBIOS 8's development started in the late-90s or early-2000s

AMIBIOS 07.00.00

Main page: AMIBIOS 7

Due to many similarities found between it and the previous AMIBIOS 07.00.00 (commonly known as AMIBIOS 07.00.xx), the latter being an uncommon release that is usually seen with a preliminary version number ("07.00.xx") and this number scheme being re-used by AMIBIOS 07.00.10 (which is based on a different codebase), it is often speculated that AMIBIOS 07.00.00 was a public beta test release that was still under development and that AMIBIOS 8 is the name for the finished release of that version.

Although the accuracy of this speculation can't be fully confirmed due to the lack of information about the development of AMIBIOS at that time, it is quite possible that AMIBIOS 07.00.00 was first offered to OEMs as a public beta release (especially since AMIBIOS 6 had been the latest version for about 4 years at that point), with AMI possibly planning a final release to replace AMIBIOS 6 sometime after that. In theory, this plan would later be changed and AMI would either release an interim release (which would be AMIBIOS 07.00.10) between AMIBIOS 6 and the new version, or release two versions instead of one (with each being based on a different codebase). In both cases, likely for marketing reasons, AMIBIOS 07.00.00 would be renamed to AMIBIOS 8 at some point during its development and AMIBIOS 07.00.10 would be released as the final AMIBIOS 7.

However, it is also possible that AMIBIOS 07.00.00 was indeed a final release, but was quickly replaced by AMIBIOS 8 for unknown reasons, possibly due to the new PC-2001 standard, which was released about a year after its release.