American Megatrends (AMI)
More info
- Creator
- Subramonian Shankar, Pat Sarma
- Released
- 1985
- Type
- Firmware vendor
The vendor whose logo once flashed past on every other PC at boot, and whose code still sits underneath most motherboards.
AMI was founded in Georgia in 1985 and, with AMIBIOS, became one of the two big BIOS suppliers alongside Phoenix. Board makers license a ready-made base and customise it, which is why the same menus and beep codes turn up in machines from entirely different brands. Its successor, Aptio, is AMI's UEFI implementation.
The less visible product is MegaRAC, firmware for the BMC that handles out-of-band server management over IPMI and Redfish. Because it ships inside many server vendors' hardware at once, its vulnerabilities become industry-wide problems; Eclypsium disclosed a series of serious ones in 2022–2023. Having one supplier under that many brands is convenient, right up until it isn't.