What will eventually become the predominant BIOS?

The predominant BIOS that is expected to become the standard is UEFI, or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. UEFI is a modern replacement for the traditional legacy BIOS and offers several advantages that position it as the future of system firmware.

One of the primary benefits of UEFI is its improved speed and efficiency in booting up computers. It can initiate hardware components more quickly and supports more advanced features compared to legacy BIOS. UEFI also allows for larger hard drives, supporting drives that are over 2 TB, which is a limitation of legacy BIOS due to its use of the Master Boot Record (MBR) partitioning scheme. UEFI instead uses the GUID Partition Table (GPT), enabling the use of expansive storage technologies.

Another significant advantage of UEFI is its enhanced security features, which include Secure Boot. Secure Boot helps prevent unauthorized software from loading during the boot process, thus providing a layer of protection against malware targeting the system early in its operation. UEFI also supports a graphical user interface and can be utilized with mouse commands, which makes it more user-friendly compared to the text-based interface of legacy BIOS.

Legacy BIOS is rapidly becoming outmoded, while EFI is a precursor to UEFI and shares some features but is not as widely adopted.