Athlon64/Opeteron bios

[Craig Matchan]

Hi all,

Just wondering if anyone knows if the bios for the Athlon/Opeteron based
motherboards from ASUS is optimised (code wise) for the Athlon64/Operton
processors, or is the code plain old x86 32bit. Mind you, not sure if it
would make much difference, just courious thats all.

Craig

 

[Kylesb]

| Hi all,
|
| Just wondering if anyone knows if the bios for the Athlon/Opeteron
based
| motherboards from ASUS is optimised (code wise) for the
Athlon64/Operton
| processors, or is the code plain old x86 32bit. Mind you, not sure
if it
| would make much difference, just courious thats all.
|
| Craig
|
|

Not that I know the answer with certainty, but given the push to get
any product to market, I suspect that the BIOS was not rewritten.
Since a BIOS is written in assembler (or perhaps even hand coded
machine instructions) I doubt that a rewrite to take advantage of
64-bit machine instructions would occur, though it IS possible that
the entire BIOS was written in assembler and "re-assembled" using a
new 64-bit assembler to produce code optimized for the 64-bit
processor (likelihood assessment of this transpiring is near 0 in my
opinion). As to whether it would make any difference, I suspect the
difference would be marginal at best, since protected mode drivers in
the OS take over for much of the functionality of the BIOS once the OS
is loaded.