PhoenixBIOS

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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.

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.