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
mega trends but despite the fact that
american mega trends 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
to a 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
megatron's 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 amis zac robroff terry
osubo as well as emily rios for helping
us out with this episode so ami actually
got its start developing motherboards
and bios's 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
we'll tell you right after we thank
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subscription 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 chipsets meaning different
motherboard and pc manufacturers can
begin at the same starting point and
then adapt ami's biosis 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 vendor's 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 space 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 100 more which is part of
the reason you see certain bios features
on some motherboards 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
percent market share ami's main
competitors are phoenix technologies and
inside 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 moon bounce
exploit as bios's are quickly becoming
popular attack vectors speaking of
bouncing
i'm gonna go try to smash that delete
button before the my screen disappears
so see you later and thanks for watching
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