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 Megatrend 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 listful website catering to people in the US.
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 Robroff,
Terry Osubo, 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. 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 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
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-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 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 70-80% 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 MoonBounce exploit,
as BIOSes are quickly becoming popular attack vectors. Speaking of bouncing, I'm going to 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.