EISA never really mattered much in the PC market in my experience. It was quickly replaced by VESA local bus for video cards on many 486 motherboards, then PCI

EISA never really mattered much in the PC market in my experience. It was quickly replaced by VESA local bus for video cards on many 486 motherboards, then PCI, AGP and eventually PCIe. That said, there were a bunch of interesting chipset vendors in the market around the time of the 386 and 486. Byte magazine ran reviews of some PCs that had quite advanced L2 caches that really outshone their competitors. That eventually died out as CPUs became more complex and tightly integrated to their chipsets. Plus Intel really did a number by refusing to license most of their bus related patents around the time of the whole RAMBUS fiasco.