In a move calculated to cement market acceptance of the EISA bus as a convincing and uncontroversial alternative both to IBM’s Micro Channel and the AT bus in the personal computer world, Compaq Computer Corp says that it is to migrate the bus throughout its line so that all new machines, including laptops will use it. The company does not plan any more 80286-based machines and will build its future bottom end machines around the 16-bit bus 80386SX – the 32-bit EISA bus is perfectly usable, albeit not to its full capability, with a 16-bit processor. A key reason for making the switch, Compaq told Computer Reseller News, is that it is designing its own VLSI support circuits, and it will be much more cost effective to use the same chips in all its machines. Compaq also said that it has shelve plans to take its Systempro servers beyond two processors because it does not see market demand for bigger ones, and that operating system support is not available for more than two CPUs, except using Unix.
