- There are lots of different PC
and motherboard manufacturers out there,
but it seems like no matter who you go with,
you often see a screen right when you start your computer
that says "American Megatrends."
But despite the fact that American Megatrends seems to be
on a huge number of computers,
very few of us seem to know who they are or what they do,
and it turns out they're not a list full website
catering to people in the U.S..
No, American Megatrends, or AMI, is a firmware developer.
That is to say they make your
computer's basic input, output system, or BIOS.
They make the BIOS, which controls the low level operation
of your PC and how it interacts with installed hardware.
You're probably mostly familiar
with the BIOS as that settings program you can access
before your computer boots into Windows.
And although the BIOS itself has the logo
of the motherboard or PC's manufacturer all over it,
what's actually going on
is that the motherboard manufacturers buy their BIOSes
from American Megatrends.
But why does one company control so much of the BIOS market?
I mean, if you go to American Megatrends website,
the homepage even proudly proclaims
"Without AMI, you can't compute."
To find the answers, we went straight to the horse's mouth.
So we'd like to thank AMI's Zach Bobroff, Terry Otsubo,
as well as Emily Rios for helping us out with this episode.
So AMI actually got its start developing motherboards
and BIOSes for Dell
and continued manufacturing motherboards all the way up
until around the Pentium 4 era.
Some of their equipment even made it
into the space shuttle program,
but they stopped manufacturing hardware
in the early to mid 2000s
after it became clear that it would make more sense
from a business standpoint to just focus on firmware.
And since then, their priority has been
to develop advanced features in a generic way.
Generic, what exactly does that mean?
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Okay, so developing features "generically" means it's easier
for the BIOS to work with CPUs from both AMD and Intel
across different generations, and different chip sets.
Meaning different motherboard and PC manufacturers can begin
at the same starting point,
and then adapt AMI's BIOSes to their specific needs.
And AMI doesn't just write the low level code,
even the visuals that we're used to today are provided,
in large part, by AMI themselves.
What you see in the finished product
are the vendors own CSS-like graphical modifications
and skins, such as the Aorus branding
on gigabyte motherboards,
or the familiar red and black ROG theme
if you're rocking an ASUS based system.
Vendors can tweak other things too.
The current UEFI BIOS that AMI ships, called Aptio,
comes with 50 or 60 features by default.
Manufacturers can choose to add up to around a hundred more,
which is part of the reason you see certain BIOS features
on some other boards, but not others.
Thanks to the flexibility of AMI's firmware,
the company controls around 40% of the PC market today,
with most of that being in the desktop and enthusiast space.
If you include the server market,
that number jumps to a whopping 70 to 80% market share.
AMI's main competitors are Phoenix Technologies,
and Insyde Software, the latter of which
is widespread in the laptop market.
Although it looks like AMI will continue
to be known chiefly as a firmware brand
for a long time to come,
they are looking at expanding
into related areas such as security,
including strengthening the chain of trust
between the BIOS and the rest of the system,
and allowing users to restore the firmware
to a known good state if it's tampered with.
AMI also hopes that its new security offerings
will help mitigate vulnerabilities
such as the relatively new MoonBounce exploit,
as BIOSes are quickly becoming popular attack vectors.
Speaking of bouncing,
I'm gonna go try to smash that delete button
before the AMI screen disappears,
so see you later and thanks for watching today's video.
If you liked it, hit like, hit subscribe,
and hit us up in the comments section
with your suggestions for topics that we should cover
in the future.