American Megatrends Inc. (AMI), a leader in BIOS and computing innovations, announced the launch of Aptio V, the newest version of its acclaimed Aptio UEFI BIOS firmware, at a seminar titled "Touch the Future with Aptio V" in Taipei, Taiwan. As the "next generation of UEFI BIOS," Aptio V features support for the latest UEFI specifications, making the latest features such as Secure Boot for enhanced platform security and EDK II support - together with all of the previous experience, value adds and improvements of Aptio 4 - available to manufacturers and developers.

Providing development tools that are easy to use and promote efficiency has always been a core goal of the world's leading BIOS company, American Megatrends. As new computing platforms enter the market at a rapid pace, the ability of these systems to incorporate new functionality and ensure full compatibility between software and hardware components have become key factors influencing BIOS development. AMI's new flagship UEFI BIOS solution, Aptio V, solves both of these challenges with ease - positioning it as the most powerful development solution for BIOS on the market today.

Innovation
Aptio V is the pinnacle of a strong legacy of innovation, both inside the BIOS itself and from related areas within AMI. AMI brings its legacy of over 25 years as a leading BIOS vendor, installed in a large number of desktop, notebook, Ultrabook, server and mobile systems worldwide, to the creation of this BIOS. Additionally, AMI's related expertise in server and remote management, system utilities, network storage solutions and mobile application development strongly informs its BIOS development. Notably, AMI is the only BIOS vendor to offer a complete array of end-to-end products to support the entire computing infrastructure.

Aptio V offers full support for touch-enabled systems and UEFI Secure Boot among a host of innovations. It also solves the same problems that persist despite the advances of UEFI - such as optimizing boot time, ensuring security and providing a common code layout irrespective of the market segment of the platform. Most importantly, Aptio V empowers developers with the tools and capability to add value and differentiate themselves from their competitors. Support for the latest UEFI specifications also means that Aptio V is fully ready to support Microsoft Windows 8 and the key security and pre-boot optimizations featured in the next-generation version of the operating system. Both UEFI Secure Boot and UEFI-only boot mode are advanced features in Microsoft Windows 8 and represent key milestones in the evolution of Aptio.

The development experience with Aptio V is greatly enhanced with AMI's Visual eBIOS (VeB) Development Environment, an enhanced integrated graphical environment to speed up BIOS development based on its ability to manage, group and graphically represent logically related drivers and modules as "components." VeB also features user-friendly graphical wizards to help create and modify project settings to further ease development tasks. VeB for Aptio V adds new wizards to manage EDK II data and a "Module Explorer" enhanced for EDK II packages, multiple source control integration, multiple OS support and cross-platform support for x86, x64 and ARM systems.

Continuity and Stability
Like EDK II and Aptio 4 before it, Aptio V is a fully modular solution. It makes use of eModules to speed up development time and make projects more manageable. Aptio V also introduces several improvements over EDK II and has been designed to make the transition from EDK, EDK II and Aptio 4 as smooth and easy as possible, with little overhead.

The Aptio V user experience keeps everything that users have come to love about Aptio 4 and takes it a step further. Setup retains the same options that existed in Aptio 4, with Text, Graphical/Text, and full Graphical setup with touch support and a unique Windows 8-style interface. AMI is currently developing a new markup language for the customization of UI pages in Aptio V which will leverage these options even further. All diagnostic and debug capabilities from Aptio 4 - including AMI Diag for UEFI, AMI Debug Rx and more - carry over seamlessly to Aptio V.

S. Shankar, President and CEO of American Megatrends, remarked that "Aptio V marks the next stage in AMI's journey of providing the most robust firmware solutions on the market. With Aptio V, our partners can continue to expect the continuity, stability and innovation for which AMI is widely known. We are confident that AMI's ability to incorporate all of the added value of Aptio 4, as well as support for EDK II, into Aptio V order will ensure our leadership position as the world's premiere independent BIOS vendor."