Extended Industry Standard Architecture

(ee-suh)

An ISA expansion architecture designed by Compaq and a consortium of other vendors and announced in 1988. It was designed to compete with IBM's Micro Channel architecture. EISA introduced a 32-bit bus and allowed multiple CPUs to share the bus. Memory access was expanded to 4GB.

While widely available for a short time, better choices evolved (e.g., PCI) and have taken over both EISA and Micro Channel.

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