Intel 8-series Chipset SPI - The new standard for x64 platform firmware storage?

I've just skimmed over the SPI section in the Intel 8-series chipset datasheet. One interesting thing to note is the flash memory organization has been regulated closely. If you recall from the legacy BIOS days, the flash memory used to store the BIOS code is just a plain block of writable bytes. This has changed in the SPI flash memory "regulation" because now we have SPI flash memory that must be divided into several sections based on the SPI flash requirements of the Intel 8-series chipset. I'll get into the details in the near future, but for now, it's enough to know that things have changed in quite a fundamental way :)