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There are lots of different PC and motherboard manufacturers out there, but it seems like

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no matter who you go with, you often see a screen right when you start your computer

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that says American Megatrends. But despite the fact that American Megatrend seems to be

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on a huge number of computers, very few of us seem to know who they are or what they do.

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And it turns out they're not a listful website catering to people in the US.

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No, American Megatrends or AMI is a firmware developer. That is to say, they make your

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computer's basic input output system, or BIOS. They make the BIOS, which controls the

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low-level operation of your PC and how it interacts with installed hardware.

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You're probably mostly familiar with the BIOS as that settings program you can access before

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your computer boots into Windows. And although the BIOS itself has the logo of the motherboard

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or PC's manufacturer all over it, what's actually going on is that the motherboard

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manufacturers buy their BIOSes from American Megatrends. But why does one company control

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so much of the BIOS market? I mean, if you go to American Megatrends website,

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the homepage even proudly proclaims, without AMI, you can't compute. To find the answers,

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we went straight to the horse's mouth. So we'd like to thank AMI's Zach Robroff,

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Terry Osubo, as well as Emily Rios for helping us out with this episode.

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So AMI actually got its start developing motherboards and BIOSes

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for Dell and continued manufacturing motherboards all the way up until

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around the Pentium 4 era. Some of their equipment even made it into the Space Shuttle program,

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but they stopped manufacturing hardware in the early to mid-2000s after it became clear

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that it would make more sense from a business standpoint to just focus on firmware. And since

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then, their priority has been to develop advanced features in a generic way. Okay, so developing

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features generically means it's easier for the BIOS to work with CPUs from both AMD and Intel

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across different generations and different chipsets, meaning different motherboard and PC

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manufacturers can begin at the same starting point and then adapt AMI's BIOSes to their specific

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needs. And AMI doesn't just write the low-level code. Even the visuals that we're used to today

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are provided in large part by AMI themselves. What you see in the finished product are the

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vendor's own CSS-like graphical modifications and skins, such as the AORUS branding on

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Gigabyte motherboards, or the familiar red and black ROG theme if you're rocking an ASUS-based

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system. Vendors can tweak other things too. The current UEFI BIOS that AMI ships, called Aptio,

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comes with 50 or 60 features by default. Manufacturers can choose to add up to around 100 more,

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which is part of the reason you see certain BIOS features on some motherboards, but not others.

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Thanks to the flexibility of AMI's firmware, the company controls around 40% of the PC market

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today, with most of that being in the desktop and enthusiast space. If you include the server

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market, that number jumps to a whopping 70-80% market share. AMI's main competitors are Phoenix

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Technologies and Inside Software, the latter of which is widespread in the laptop market.

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Although it looks like AMI will continue to be known chiefly as a firmware brand for a long time

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to come, they are looking at expanding into related areas, such as security, including

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strengthening the chain of trust between the BIOS and the rest of the system, and allowing users

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to restore the firmware to a known good state if it's tampered with. AMI also hopes that its new

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security offerings will help mitigate vulnerabilities such as the relatively new MoonBounce exploit,

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as BIOSes are quickly becoming popular attack vectors. Speaking of bouncing, I'm going to go try

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to smash that delete button before the AMI screen disappears, so see you later and thanks for watching

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today's video. If you liked it, hit like, hit subscribe, and hit us up in the comments section

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with your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future.