Extended Industry Standard Architecture

The Extended Industry Standard Architecture ( almost always called in practice EISA ) is a standard that extends the ISA bus to 32 bits. He also adds the ability to share the bus between multiple CPUs. Support for Bus Mastering has also been further improved, so now 4 GB of memory can be achieved. In contrast to the MCA EISA can use older cards from the XT bus and ISA bus. This is a two-story design of the slot and a locking collar ( prevents the older cards touch the newly added contacts) allows. The configuration of expansion cards had to be made manually in the BIOS, an automatic configuration of PCI did not exist here.

The EISA standard was initiated in the late 1980s by Compaq - as an opponent to IBM's MCA in its PS/2-Serie. Although EISA MCA was actually technically inferior, it gained greater popularity through its backward compatibility.

See also: Industry Standard Architecture (ISA ), Micro Channel Architecture ( MCA), Peripheral Component Interconnect ( PCI), XT bus architecture

Specifications

• Peripheral bus (internal)