ISA was designed to connect peripheral playing cards to the motherboard and allows for bus mastering. The 16-bit version was an improve for the motherboard buses of the Intel 80286 CPU (and expanded interrupt and DMA facilities) used within the IBM AT, with improved support for bus mastering. IBM designed the 8-bit version as a buffered interface to the motherboard buses of the Intel 8088 (16/eight bit) CPU in the IBM Pc and Pc/XT, Free slots no download augmented with prioritized interrupts and DMA channels.

The ISA bus was due to this fact synchronous with the CPU clock until subtle buffering methods were applied by chipsets to interface ISA to a lot quicker CPUs. An additional deviation between ISA and ATA is that whereas the ISA bus remained locked into a single customary clock rate (for Best Online slots backward hardware compatibility), the ATA interface supplied many various pace modes, free slots no download may choose amongst them to match the utmost pace supported by the connected drives, and stored adding quicker speeds with later versions of the ATA standard (up to 133 MB/s for ATA-6, the latest.) In most types, ATA ran much sooner than ISA, provided it was linked on to a local bus (e.g.

southbridge-integrated IDE interfaces) faster than the ISA bus. Later buses akin to VESA Local Bus and Free slots online PCI have been used as a substitute, often along with ISA Free slots no download on the identical mainboard.

Computer manufacturers responded to MCA by developing the Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA) and Free slots the later VESA Local Bus (VLB). 1987, IBM replaced the AT bus with its proprietary Micro Channel Architecture (MCA).

The 16-bit ISA bus was also used with 32-bit processors for a number of years. In 1988, free slots online the 32-bit EISA standard was proposed by the Gang of Nine group of Pc-suitable manufacturers that included Compaq.