So the question is quite self-explanatory i think. Is there a way to find out the specifications of the non-volatile memory chips built in the common home/office PC motherboard models on the market now?
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This depends on the specific memory part used.– RamhoundJul 10, 2016 at 20:14
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I know it depends. However i do not see the rom memory used in moat producer specification websites.– yoyo_funJul 10, 2016 at 20:15
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Most modern hardware doesn't use ROM chips anyways. How can we specify the speed of the part used isn't specified? A question like this isn't a good fit for Q&A sites like Superuser– RamhoundJul 10, 2016 at 20:22
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1 Answer
BIOS chips on motherboards are almost universally SPI chips. An example component is the W25Q64CV which is on a bunch of recent motherboards including H/Z 97 models from MSI, ASUS, Acer, AsROCK, and so on.
There are a number of variables involved in calculating the throughput - clock rate, single, double, or quad data rates, DMA vs. Programmed IO interface (which imply CPU waits), among many others.
As a very rough SWAG, an initial boot up (the fastest rate mode is optimized for this; which makes sense considering it's use case) dump of the contents of the W25Q64CV flash using quad data rate and a clock of 80 Mhz could reach (theoretically) read out rates of 320 mbps. In other words, a host could read out that entire chip of 64 Mbits (8 MBytes) in 200 ms across the SPI interface. Slow compared to some modern interfaces, but fast for the world of serial flash.
See this project for some raw metrics on a variety of SPI devices
