Gateway MX6920(intel) MX6451(AMD) same BIOS...why?

I have checked Gateway's website and I found out that the following two laptops have the same BIOS:

MX6920 - Intel Core Duo T2050
MX6451 - AMD Turion TL50

WHY?
Isn't different plaform = diffrent BIOS?

 

don't worry about it. unless you or someone here has experience with a disassembler and can compare binary and assembler codes in the bios you'll likely never get an answer.

 

Thanks for your answer.

Often I read that you can't use a Bios made for one system in another. So I want to understand why?

 

a) Gateway/Acer might have found a way to build some kind of smart installer that can sort out differences.

b) Gateway/Acer might have been damned stupid and named the downloads for different machines with the same filename.

Your caution is wholly justified. b) is the scary case and it's why I never, EVER update my bios unless the file listing is at least a month old on the makers web site. let the rest of the world troubleshoot new downloads.

 

The laptops I've listed above have been sold around 2006-07, I mean before Acer bought gateway.
From the time I spent in Gateway website I've learned that they name their Bios using a four digit number. For example an MX6920 bios is 77xx.rom, with the latest version been 7712.rom.

I'm quite sure that they didn't make any mistake (i.e. they didn't name two bios with the same name). This is because the 7712.rom is used in at least 30 different Gateway laptops, and no matter which one I select I always download the same file.

I like your theory regarding the smart installer,
So basically Winphlash1656 and Phlash1656 are cleaver enough to distinguish between an Intel and an AMD system.

 

Or maybe, just like a BIOS can have support for multiple different CPUs and GPUs, it can also have support for multiple chipsets? That way, it's not so much the flashing utility that can distinguish, but the BIOS itself that can figure out what components are there, and thus which instruction sets to load. Of course, the downside of this is that it would probably result in a rather bloated BIOS, to cover all the possibilities.

 

Did you do a MD5 Checksum to verify the BIOS are the same or are guessing based on the filename?

 

One weired thing;
This bois came on a compressed file. This contained a bios file, Winphlash1656, few readme files, a bios log file. and a bios map file. I checked the log file which contains all previous revisions. I can see that the ATI VGA bios has been updated few time, that the AMD chipset has been updated few times too. I see that intel CPU micro codes have been added to support more Core Duo and Core 2 Duo. I CAN'T FIND ANY THING ABOUT UPDATING AMD CPU MICROCODES.

Other weired thing is I uncompressed the BIOS file with PBE and opened its UPDATE0.ROM on a hex editor. I compared this one with those I extracted from other BIOSes. The structure of this file doesn't look like it contains intel microcodes nor AMD microcodes?!

I didn't need to check because the http address was the same