PhoenixBIOS is a personal computer BIOS developed by Phoenix Technologies since 1983. Nowadays, it has been mostly replaced by Phoenix's UEFI solution SecureCore.
PhoenixBIOS is the first fully IBM PC compatible personal computer BIOS that was mass licensed to other system manufacturers. Before its introduction, manufacturers (often illegally) had to reverse engineer the IBM BIOS for PC compatibility on their computers. It is therefore also the starter of the competition between Phoenix and other commercial BIOS vendors that came up with their own solutions later on (such as American Megatrends with their AMIBIOS and Award Software with their AwardBIOS).
List of known versions
The following is a list of known PhoenixBIOS versions.
| Main core version | Main core release date | POST screen | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phoenix ROM BIOS 1.xx | 1984 | ||
| Phoenix ROM BIOS 2.xx | 1986? | ||
| Phoenix ROM BIOS PLUS | 1987 | A code fork by Dell exists. Probably considered as PhoenixBIOS 3.xx by Phoenix. | |
| PhoenixBIOS 4.0x | 1988 | A code fork by Intel exists | |
| PhoenixBIOS Ax86 | 1990? | ||
| PhoenixBIOS 4.0 Release 6.x | 1997 | Labelled as PhoenixBIOS 4.06 by Fujitsu-Siemens. Also used by VMware. A code fork by Intel also exists. | |
| Phoenix ServerBIOS 1 | 1997 | ||
| Phoenix ServerBIOS 2 | 2000 | ||
| Phoenix ServerBIOS 3 | 2001 | ||
| Phoenix ServerBIOS 3.5 Grid Edition | 2002 | Referred to in a news article. Possibly an AMD-only special release. |