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In computing, BIOS (/ ˈ b aɪ ɒ s,-oʊ s /, BY-oss, -ohss; Basic Input/Output System, also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS, BIOS ROM or PC BIOS) is a type of firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization during the booting process (power-on startup). [1]
A hardware compatibility list (HCL) is a list of computer hardware (typically including many types of peripheral devices) that is compatible with a particular operating system or device management software. The list contains both whole computer systems and specific hardware elements including motherboards, sound cards, and video cards. [1]
Most motherboards have connectors for additional computer fans and integrated temperature sensors to detect motherboard and CPU temperatures and controllable fan connectors which the BIOS or operating system can use to regulate fan speed. [5] Alternatively computers can use a water cooling system instead of many fans.
There are a number of other companies (AMD, Microchip, Altera, etc.) making specialized chipsets as part of other ICs, and they are not often found in PC hardware (laptop, desktop or server). There are also a number of now defunct companies (like 3com, DEC, SGI) that produced network related chipsets for us in general computers.
VIA chipsets support CPUs from Intel, AMD (e.g. the Athlon 64) and VIA themselves (e.g. the VIA C3 or C7).They support CPUs as old as the i386 in the early 1990s. In the early 2000s, their chipsets began to offer on-chip graphics support from VIA's joint venture with S3 Graphics beginning in 2001; this support continued into the early 2010s, with the release of the VX11H in August 2012.
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An option ROM for the PC platform (i.e. the IBM PC and derived successor computer systems) is a piece of firmware that resides in ROM on an expansion card (or stored along with the main system BIOS), which gets executed to initialize the device and (optionally) add support for the device to the BIOS.