While most people tend to stop with bland and trite statements such as innovation is key in the technology industry, S. Shankar, the President and CEO of the US-based American Megatrends (www.ami.com), goes a step further. We should be talking not just about the adoption of new technologies but about the experience of choosing which ones are key to the customer’s needs, he explains, during an early morning interaction a few weeks ago in Nageswara Rao Park.
“Our industry is overflowing with great ideas, but the key it to have an innovative product,” observes Shankar. He then cites the saying, ‘Code is easy, products are hard,’ to emphasise that companies consistently delivering quality products are the ones that continue to bring the best innovations to market. His eyes light up reminiscing the early days of computing in India, when he was part of the team in MMC (Machinery Manufacturers Corporation, a division of Mahindra and Mahindra) that put together ‘Charlie,’ the first PC clone in the country.
A B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras (1971), Shankar worked for three years in the R&D labs of Tata Electric Company, before proceeding to Canada for his Masters in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Brunswick in 1976. American Megatrends Inc., which Shankar founded in 1985, is ‘the world’s largest BIOS (basic input/ output system) firmware vendor, with AMIBIOS deployed in more than 65 per cent of all computers worldwide.’
For starters, the BIOS is boot firmware, designed to be the first code run by a PC when powered on, as Wikipedia explains. “The initial function of the BIOS is to identify, test, and initialise system devices such as the video display card, hard disk, floppy disk and other hardware. The BIOS prepares the machine for a known state, so that software stored on compatible media can be loaded, executed, and given control of the PC. This process is known as booting, or booting up, which is short for bootstrapping.”
Among the many firsts mentioned in the company’s Website are the following: “First to build motherboards based on the Intel 386 and 486 processor platforms, and first to use onboard external cache designs to significantly improve their performance…First to support USB (universal serial bus) in BIOS, first to create a GUI (graphical user interface) BIOS interface with mouse support, first to integrate diagnostics into BIOS…”
And my conversation with Shankar, the BIOS boss, continues over the email. Here are a few excerpts from the interview.
Over the decades that BIOS has been around, what has changed and what has not?
As an industry leader, AMI has seen several changes in BIOS over the decades. Initially BIOS was built to support X86 architectures. Operating systems such as Microsoft DOS (disk operating system) heavily relied on BIOS to carry out most of input/ output tasks within the PC (personal computer).
With the progress of computing from 8-bit, 16-bit to 32-bit CPUs (central processing units), the operating systems such as Linux and Microsoft Windows had native drivers to interact with the hardware directly. Also, during the time several new standards were introduced and adapted. One such was Open Firmware (IEEE-1275) being adopted by servers and workstations using PowerPC or SPARC CPUs.
There was a similar transition for the Apple Macintosh, where the system software originally relied heavily on the ToolBox – a set of drivers and other useful routines stored in ROM (read only memory) based on Motorola’s 680x0 CPUs. These Apple ROMs were replaced by Open Firmware in the PowerPC Macintosh, then EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) in Intel Macintosh computers.
With the advancement in computing, BIOS took on more complex functions, by way of interfaces such as ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface); these functions include power management, hot swapping and thermal management.
However, BIOS limitations – 16-bit processor mode, only 1 MiB (mebibyte or megabinary byte) addressable space, PC AT hardware dependencies, etc. – were seen as clearly unacceptable for the newer computer platforms.
Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is a specification which replaces the runtime interface of the legacy BIOS. Initially written for the Itanium architecture, EFI is now available for x86 and x86-64 platforms; the specification development is driven by The Unified EFI Forum, an industry Special Interest Group. Linux has supported EFI via the ‘elilo’ boot loader.
There is some activity also happening in the Open Source community to develop BIOS through the coreboot and OpenBIOS/ Open Firmware projects. AMD provided product specifications for some chipsets, and Google is sponsoring the project.
Are enterprises in the non-computing industries leveraging the BIOS concept enough? Do you see the need for a greater appreciation of embedded intelligence?
We do find BIOS playing a major role in embedded intelligence. A few data points seem to suggest that the embedded market is going to have a good growth:
- Revenues for VLSI (very-large-scale integration), board design and embedded software market to reach $10.96 billion in 2010.
- Intel projects the total semiconductor market to hit $36.3 billion by 2015.
- ISA and Frost & Sullivan project that the semiconductor market will hit $14.42 billion by 2010 and $43.07 billion by 2015.
- India’s electronic equipment consumption, which was $28.2 billion in 2005, is expected to reach $363 billion by 2015, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30 per cent.
As an ‘Alliance Affiliate Partner’ of Intel, we do find Intel’s new Atom processor focused specifically for consumer electronic devices like handhelds, MIDs (mobile Internet devices), smart mobile phones, navigation systems etc.
American Megatrends has been supporting these processors as well, by providing the BIOS for these processors. Intel, by entering into the consumer electronic space with its Atom Processor based on the x86 platform, is now competing directly with vendors such as Texas Instruments (TI) and ARM.
Consumer electronics being a very price-sensitive market segment, we have equipped ourselves to support customers using Intel Atom Processors by providing the best of features, with the best of performance and enabling them at very low up-front investment.
From your experience, what are the secrets of staying power, and also brand establishment in the hi-tech industry?
The real customer for AMI is the platform manufacturer (the original equipment manufacturer or OEM). Our value is in providing tools for BIOS and low-level platform management. We feel customers continue to choose our products because we facilitate the stability and flexibility they need to make the product seamless for the end user.
What are the challenges in server management, an area that AMI has ventured into after the success in BIOS?
Server management relies as much on standards and innovation as does BIOS. The OEMs want the same type of stability and flexibility as they see in BIOS, but they don’t want to be locked into a proprietary solution that limits the end-user’s solution. Products like MegaRAC have a solid history of providing features using standards. So much so that acronyms such as DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force), IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), DASH (Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware) and SSI (Server System Infrastructure) aren’t just buzzwords to us; they represent our ability to be innovative on an even playing field.
