Interrupts are used to facilitate hardware signals sent to the processor that temporarily stop a running program and allow a special program, an interrupt handler, to run instead.
An EOI is used to cause a PIC to clear the corresponding bit in the in-service register (ISR), and thus allow more interrupt requests (IRQs) of equal or lower priority to be generated by the PIC.
[1][2] EOIs may indicate the interrupt vector implicitly or explicitly.
Also, EOIs may be sent at the end of interrupt processing by an interrupt handler, or the operation of a PIC may be set to auto-EOI at the start of the interrupt handler.
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