Extended Industry-Standard Architecture

architecture, standard (EISA) /eesa/ A bus standard for

IBM compatibles that extends the ISA bus architecture to

32 bits and allows more than one CPU to share the bus. The

bus mastering support is also enhanced to provide access to

4 GB of memory. Unlike MCA, EISA can accept older XT busarchitecture and ISA boards.

EISA was announced in late 1988 by compatible vendors as a

counter to IBM's MCA in its PS/2 series. Although

somewhat inferior to the MCA it became much more popular due

to the proprietary nature of MCA.

[Main sponsors? Open standard?]

(1996-06-25)