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Lenovo acquires Phoenix Technologies’ BIOS business

erek

erek

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“For Lenovo, this is about bringing more of the technology in-house. Firmware runs before the operating system even starts, so it handles things like hardware initialization, security features, platform settings, and updates. Lenovo says Phoenix also adds engineering know-how and existing ties with...”

Source: VideoCardz.com
https://videocardz.com/newz/lenovo-acquires-phoenix-technologies-bios-business
 
erek said:
“For Lenovo, this is about bringing more of the technology in-house. Firmware runs before the operating system even starts, so it handles things like hardware initialization, security features, platform settings, and updates. Lenovo says Phoenix also adds engineering know-how and existing ties with...”

Source: VideoCardz.com
https://videocardz.com/newz/lenovo-acquires-phoenix-technologies-bios-business
Click to expand...
This won't end well for Lenovo. You never buy up one of your key suppliers, who is also a key supplier to your competitors. If and when you do that, all your competitors will migrate to other suppliers over time. i saw that up close and personal when my company was bought by a key customer to assure our continued financial viability. Next two-three years we lost a lot of the rest of the customer base.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Do these business leaders ever read business history?
 
philb2 said:
This won't end well for Lenovo. You never buy up one of your key suppliers, who is also a key supplier to your competitors. If and when you do that, all your competitors will migrate to other suppliers over time. i saw that up close and personal when my company was bought by a key customer to assure our continued financial viability. Next two-three years we lost a lot of the rest of the customer base.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Do these business leaders ever read business history?
Click to expand...

Did your new corporate overlords have a better next quarter after acquisition? (Comparing their last gross quarter income to the merged companies next quarter gross income and ignoring all 1 off merger expenses.) Because that's the extent of a corporate executives mental horizon.
 
ChadD said:
https://www.coreboot.org/
I would assume everyone who is not Lenovo is already exploring their options and figuring out how much it will cost them to engineer a in house coreboot distro.
Click to expand...
Yes, cb would be the obvious base, but someone would probably want to build an sdk around that with features motherboard vendors were used to dealing with when they customized pheonix/ami bios/fw in the past.
 
Nobu said:
Yes, cb would be the obvious base, but someone would probably want to build an sdk around that with features motherboard vendors were used to dealing with when they customized pheonix/ami bios/fw in the past.
Click to expand...
This purchase might move some of the larger OEMs to do the work themselves for their own devices.

I mean if System76 can do it.... does HP or Dell really have any good reason they couldn't be as well. Sounds like they might have good reason to get on it now.
 
Why are people acting like Coreboot/OSS is the only alternative to Phoenix? I thought AMI had a bigger market share already.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Nice, now Lenovo can do their rootkit spyware right in the bios, instead of just in their updater app...
Click to expand...
I'm sure this is exactly the truth.
I mean why else do you want to own the Bios company. It isn't a booming business what with most chromebooks already using coreboot. As well as the entire industry moving to open firmware.

AMD is moving to opensil, it seems fully within the next year or two.
https://www.amd.com/en/blogs/2023/empowering-the-industry-with-open-system-firmware-.html
Reports over the last few months say AMD is planning to dump AGESA for OpenSil with Zen6.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-com...replacement-for-agesa-shows-up-ahead-of-zen-6

Intel has been doing the same with minimum platform.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/topic-technology/firmware/overview.html
https://www.intel.com/content/www/u...-uefi-firmware-for-intel-based-platforms.html

With the entire industry moving to open source firmware. It really does seem like a strange time to go and buy one of the old bios companies. Unless you want to go a different way from the rest of the industry I guess.
 
DanNeely said:
Did your new corporate overlords have a better next quarter after acquisition? (Comparing their last gross quarter income to the merged companies next quarter gross income and ignoring all 1 off merger expenses.) Because that's the extent of a corporate executives mental horizon.
Click to expand...
Don't remember all the details. What I do remember is al the duplication in organizational responsibilities, all the infighting, etc., etc
 
philb2 said:
Or go to AMI or maybe form an industry consortium.
Click to expand...
There isn't really any need. Its all open source. There already is a industry consortium UEFI. UEFI is open source.
AMD, Intel and ARM all pushing to move firmware open. I don't really see a great future in selling firmware as a buisness model.
Intel created TianoCore, AMD is moving to opensil.

Even ARM isn't looking to do anything proprietary.
https://developer.arm.com/Tools and Software/Tianocore EDKII Firmware

Anyway. We'll see what Lenovo does with phoenix. I don't really understand the advantage of acquiring them. Unless it really is just for the people. I don't know it was a private company no idea on financials. Perhaps they realize their time was winding down, and Lenovo got the company at a great price and retain a handful of good engineers.
 
ChadD said:
There isn't really any need. Its all open source. There already is a industry consortium UEFI. UEFI is open source.
AMD, Intel and ARM all pushing to move firmware open. I don't really see a great future in selling firmware as a buisness model.
Intel created TianoCore, AMD is moving to opensil.

Even ARM isn't looking to do anything proprietary.
https://developer.arm.com/Tools and Software/Tianocore EDKII Firmware

Anyway. We'll see what Lenovo does with phoenix. I don't really understand the advantage of acquiring them. Unless it really is just for the people. I don't know it was a private company no idea on financials. Perhaps they realize their time was winding down, and Lenovo got the company at a great price and retain a handful of good engineers.
Click to expand...
Now that I'm thinking about it, There are a few Lenovo systems which have support in coreboot, I wonder if they are thinking of using the IP/manpower they get from Pheonix to start officially supporting coreboot...

OFaceSIG said:
Many, many, laptops use BIOS from a company called Insyde. It's super common.
Click to expand...
I've never seen one, but otoh I haven't used a laptop in ages and the one I own is a bulldozer core I think.
 
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ChadD said:
There isn't really any need. Its all open source. There already is a industry consortium UEFI. UEFI is open source.
AMD, Intel and ARM all pushing to move firmware open. I don't really see a great future in selling firmware as a buisness model.
Intel created TianoCore, AMD is moving to opensil.

Even ARM isn't looking to do anything proprietary.
https://developer.arm.com/Tools and Software/Tianocore EDKII Firmware

Anyway. We'll see what Lenovo does with phoenix. I don't really understand the advantage of acquiring them. Unless it really is just for the people. I don't know it was a private company no idea on financials. Perhaps they realize their time was winding down, and Lenovo got the company at a great price and retain a handful of good engineers.
Click to expand...
This is the correct take. The "BIOS" as it was in the before times no longer exists. Hasn't for a while.
 
philb2 said:
This won't end well for Lenovo. You never buy up one of your key suppliers, who is also a key supplier to your competitors. If and when you do that, all your competitors will migrate to other suppliers over time. i saw that up close and personal when my company was bought by a key customer to assure our continued financial viability. Next two-three years we lost a lot of the rest of the customer base.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Do these business leaders ever read business history?
Click to expand...
Lenovo Chinese company, so I sure hope all of their board manufacturers migrate to alternative suppliers. No telling what spyware they will embed in the BIOS.
 
ChadD said:
Anyway. We'll see what Lenovo does with phoenix. I don't really understand the advantage of acquiring them. Unless it really is just for the people. I don't know it was a private company no idea on financials. Perhaps they realize their time was winding down, and Lenovo got the company at a great price and retain a handful of good engineers.
Click to expand...
I actually worked at Phoenix very briefly, about 20 years ago. At the time, the engineers I worked with were either very smart and well informed, or completely unaware of how PCs worked or of the PC market, even though PC makers were their customers. The top management was largely screwed up.

Big issue was their pricing model. As PC makers started to source their machines from ODMs, the ODMs large volumes got their significant discounts over what individual OEMs paid per license (per device).
 
sleepeeg3 said:
Lenovo Chinese company, so I sure hope all of their board manufacturers migrate to alternative suppliers. No telling what spyware they will embed in the BIOS.
Click to expand...
Or are pressured by the government to insert spyware. If I were in charge of security for a government agency, I would want to lock down all Lenovo machines, no more BIOS updates as of now! And no more purchases of anything from Lenovo. Damn shame.

Personally I have used Thinkpads for 20+ years. Next laptop will be from another company
 
philb2 said:
Or are pressured by the government to insert spyware. If I were in charge of security for a government agency, I would want to lock down all Lenovo machines, no more BIOS updates as of now! And no more purchases of anything from Lenovo. Damn shame.

Personally I have used Thinkpads for 20+ years. Next laptop will be from another company
Click to expand...
IIRC Lenovo was removed from the list of DoD approved vendors after the sale years ago.
 
ChadD said:
I'm sure this is exactly the truth.
I mean why else do you want to own the Bios company. It isn't a booming business what with most chromebooks already using coreboot. As well as the entire industry moving to open firmware.

AMD is moving to opensil, it seems fully within the next year or two.
https://www.amd.com/en/blogs/2023/empowering-the-industry-with-open-system-firmware-.html
Reports over the last few months say AMD is planning to dump AGESA for OpenSil with Zen6.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-com...replacement-for-agesa-shows-up-ahead-of-zen-6

Intel has been doing the same with minimum platform.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/topic-technology/firmware/overview.html
https://www.intel.com/content/www/u...-uefi-firmware-for-intel-based-platforms.html

With the entire industry moving to open source firmware. It really does seem like a strange time to go and buy one of the old bios companies. Unless you want to go a different way from the rest of the industry I guess.
Click to expand...
Could be thinking with their market share in the enterprise space, to own everything from the hardware to the bios - will it let them alleviate issues, or just implement great "controls", Wanting to go the way of Apple, maybe eventually moving to ARM or their own custom chips to own the entire stack below the OS...

philb2 is an interesting one, wonder what North American governments tend to buy for their devices, Dell, HP or Lenovo....

With the FCC change on routers, will it soon apply to OEM's for devices also...

With Lenovo taking over a BIOS company, they could easily implement some form of BIOS code or tracking, or what ever, that just appears to go back to "Lenovo" servers...which they could claim are update servers or something....so unless someone can decompile said bios's...
 
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MrGuvernment said:
Could be thinking with their market share in the enterprise space, to own everything from the hardware to the bios - will it let them alleviate issues, or just implement great "controls", Wanting to go the way of Apple, maybe eventually moving to ARM or their own custom chips to own the entire stack below the OS...

philb2 is an interesting one, wonder what North American governments tend to buy for their devices, Dell, HP or Lenovo....

With the FCC change on routers, will it soon apply to OEM's for devices also...

With Lenovo taking over a BIOS company, they could easily implement some form of BIOS code or tracking, or what ever, that just appears to go back to "Lenovo" servers...which they could claim are update servers or something....so unless someone can decompile said bios's...
Click to expand...

Well consumers can just vote with their wallets. Much out there using some form of open source bios. More will be in the future.

On the enterprise angle. Maybe there is something there. Once you are talking about the real true whale customers though.... they are all running open (or 100% open to them) custom bios type stuff.

I'm honestly still confused how this purchase makes any sense. Outside of them being perhaps cheap, and coming with a handful of patents and maybe people... though I struggle to understand what advantage bios engineers have at this point. Not that firmware engineers are still not important, its just with all the major CPU vendors pushing toward fully open source setups basically already or very shortly. I don't know, maybe it really was just the opportunity to grab a bunch of possibly useful patents for cheap.
 
I can't remember the last time I had a machine with a Phoenix BIOS on it. Other than maybe patents, do they still even do anything in the retail sector or just maybe OEM stuff?
 
SunnyD said:
I can't remember the last time I had a machine with a Phoenix BIOS on it. Other than maybe patents, do they still even do anything in the retail sector or just maybe OEM stuff?
Click to expand...
They bought Award which was on nearly everything I used up until UEFI became the standard. I do specifically remember my 286 had Pheonix BIOS.
 
ChadD said:
I don't know, maybe it really was just the opportunity to grab a bunch of possibly useful patents for cheap.
Click to expand...
Probably. Without too much strategic thinking. Managements often do that, of course.
 
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philb2 said:
Or are pressured by the government to insert spyware. If I were in charge of security for a government agency, I would want to lock down all Lenovo machines, no more BIOS updates as of now! And no more purchases of anything from Lenovo. Damn shame.

Personally I have used Thinkpads for 20+ years. Next laptop will be from another company
Click to expand...
Show me a laptop with a 100% China free supply chain. Doesn't exist.

DanNeely said:
IIRC Lenovo was removed from the list of DoD approved vendors after the sale years ago.
Click to expand...
Correct. HP or Dell. I've seen lately most everything is moving Dell with some HP still hanging around.

MrGuvernment said:
Could be thinking with their market share in the enterprise space, to own everything from the hardware to the bios - will it let them alleviate issues, or just implement great "controls", Wanting to go the way of Apple, maybe eventually moving to ARM or their own custom chips to own the entire stack below the OS...

philb2 is an interesting one, wonder what North American governments tend to buy for their devices, Dell, HP or Lenovo....

With the FCC change on routers, will it soon apply to OEM's for devices also...

With Lenovo taking over a BIOS company, they could easily implement some form of BIOS code or tracking, or what ever, that just appears to go back to "Lenovo" servers...which they could claim are update servers or something....so unless someone can decompile said bios's...
Click to expand...
The laptop company still delivers the firmware updates to you. They are a literal man-in-the-middle. They have always had the ability to modify the firmware as they see fit. This doesn't really make that any easier.
 
With Phoenix Technologies being absorved by Lenovo and AMI by Lattice in a period of less than two months, there is a major vaccum in IBVs (Independent BIOS Vendor). So this seems like an excellent place to put this SP5 EPYC board:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Dasharo-Firmware-MZ33-AR1

There is also an upcoming AM5 board, the MSI PRO B850-P, based on Coreboot with Phoenix OpenSIL in the works (Note than all this is still evaluation code, but is also the only way you're gonna get open source Firmware if you want it NOW in AMD platforms):
https://www.phoronix.com/review/msi-pro-b850p-wifi

It comes from the same people that did the MSI PRO Z690-A from 2022, which had a thread in this forum:
https://hardforum.com/threads/there...-now-its-running-on-modern-intel-pcs.2018931/
 
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