At 02:16 AM 2/10/98 -0600, Denys wrote:
>The 16 IRQ is an ISA limitation.  ISA just keeps hanging around even on the
>latest chipsets, such as 440LX.  When it disappears the limit will be
>lifted.  Look for a motherboard totally without ISA later this year.

The IRQ limitation arises from the peculiar use of the interrupt handler
chips.  It requires a separate piece of copper for each interrupt.  My BIOS
requires me to assign an interrupt to a specific PCI socket which doesn't
seem to lift the limit - what happens with cards that need more than one
interrupt?

The only way I can see the interrupt limitation being lifted is to use a
different interrupt scheme, as was used with the old 8080/Z80 CP/M
computers (which had a single interrupt line with the interrupt routine
address forced on to the address bus, but with no specific priority).  Is
this what is going to happen?  This would invalidate all existing interrupt
drivers and that doesn't seem to have happened so far.