Extended Industry Standard Architecture - Technical Data

Technical Data

Although the EISA bus had a slight performance disadvantage over MCA (bus speed of 8.33 MHz, compared to 10 MHz), EISA contained almost all of the technological benefits that MCA boasted, including bus mastering, burst mode, software configurable resources, and 32-bit data/address buses. These brought EISA nearly to par with MCA from a performance standpoint, and EISA easily defeated MCA in industry support.

EISA replaced the tedious jumper configuration common with ISA cards with software-based configuration. Every EISA system shipped with an EISA configuration utility; this was usually a slightly customized version of the standard utilities written by the EISA chipset makers. The user would boot into this utility, either from floppy disk or on a dedicated hard drive partition. The utility software would detect all EISA cards in the system, and could configure any hardware resources (interrupts, memory ports, etc.) on any EISA card (each EISA card would include a disk with information that described the available options on the card), or on the EISA system motherboard. The user could also enter information about ISA cards in the system, allowing the utility to automatically reconfigure EISA cards to avoid resource conflicts.

Similarly, Windows 95, with its Plug-and-Play capability, was not able to change the configuration of EISA cards, but it could detect the cards, read their configuration, and reconfigure Plug and Play hardware to avoid resource conflicts. Windows 95 would also automatically attempt to install appropriate drivers for detected EISA cards.