Local Bus gives peripherals direct access to the PCs CPU rather than having their signals arbitrated by ISA, EISA, or MCA I/O expansion buses. The local bus provides a 32-bit bus that operates at the same speed as the CPU; this provides a fourfold increase in performance over the EISA bus design, which is limited to an 8-MHz operating speed. Theoretically, a local bus could allow a peripheral to send and accept data at the full speed of the 386 or 486 CPU across a 32-bit data bus.
Definition