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It is referred to as non-volatile memory or NVRAM because, after the system loses power, it does retain state by virtue of the CMOS battery. When the battery fails, BIOS settings are reset to their defaults. The battery can also be used to power a real time clock (RTC) and the RTC, NVRAM and battery may be integrated into a single component.
This design by IBM was modeled after their larger mainframe systems, which would perform a complete hardware test as part of their cold-start process. As the PC platform evolved into more of a commodity consumer device, the mainframe and minicomputer-inspired high-reliability features such as parity memory and the thorough memory test in every ...
This is often called the CMOS battery or BIOS battery. The original IBM AT through to the PS/2 range, used a relatively large primary lithium battery, compared to later models, to retain the clock and configuration memory. [2] These early machines required the backup battery to be replaced periodically due to the relatively large power consumption.
Later computers, including all IBM-compatibles with 80286 CPUs, had a battery-backed nonvolatile BIOS memory (CMOS RAM chip) that held BIOS settings. [48] These settings, such as video-adapter type, memory size, and hard-disk parameters, could only be configured by running a configuration program from a disk, not built into the ROM.
Non-volatile random-access memory (NVRAM) is random-access memory that retains data without applied power. This is in contrast to dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and static random-access memory (SRAM), which both maintain data only for as long as power is applied, or forms of sequential-access memory such as magnetic tape, which cannot be randomly accessed but which retains data ...
[3] [4] The usage calls attention to the requirement that, if most software is loaded onto a computer by other software already running on the computer, some mechanism must exist to load the initial software onto the computer. [5] Early computers used a variety of ad-hoc methods to get a small program into memory to solve this problem.
A type of UEFI application is an OS boot loader such as GRUB, rEFInd, Gummiboot, and Windows Boot Manager, which loads some OS files into memory and executes them. Also, an OS boot loader can provide a user interface to allow the selection of another UEFI application to run. Utilities like the UEFI Shell are also UEFI applications.
Other examples of non-volatile memory include read-only memory (ROM), EPROM (erasable programmable ROM) and EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable ROM), ferroelectric RAM, most types of computer data storage devices (e.g. disk storage, hard disk drives, optical discs, floppy disks, and magnetic tape), and early computer storage methods such ...