On Thu, 2 Mar 2006 20:45:14 +0800, "fixpc" put
finger to keyboard and composed:

is CMOS = BIOS in motherboard?

No. Modern motherboards contain BIOS code in a flash EEPROM. The
realtime clock (RTC) and CMOS RAM are located in a different chip, or
are built into the chipset. CMOS RAM consists of 128 or 256 bytes
which store info such as date and time, chipset register settings,
hard drive geometry, etc. The flash EEPROM stores the compressed BIOS
code and the ESCD table. The latter contains device specific settings
such as lists of allowable IRQ, DMA, and IO addresses for PnP devices.
After exiting BIOS setup, you may see an "updating NVRAM" message
during the POST. This usually indicates that the ESCD table within the
EEPROM is being updated. The same message does not appear after
changing memory timings, for example, because these are determined by
chipset register settings which are written to CMOS RAM.

- Franc Zabkar
--
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