HP 9000/735 & 755
Overview
Project names:
- 735/99, 735/125: Hardball
- 755/99, 755/125: Coral II
Time of introduction
1992
The 735 and 755 were designed as technical/graphical workstations or as computing servers without a framebuffer. Both 735 (desktop) and 755 (weird tower) have a very solid and massive casing which is kind of tricky to open. They also feature a large set of expansion options, buses and drives. The 735 was widely used as a FDDI node in Convex clusters.
Prices at time of introduction started at US $37,395 (735/99) and $58,995 (755/99).
Internals
CPU
Chipset
- ASP2 chipset, featuring:
- Cutoff ASIC, interfacing with memory (Viper) and I/O buses, provides address decoding, bus arbitration and interrupts
- Shortstop ASIC, coordinates data communication between the I/O buses and the mainbus
- NCR 53C700 8-bit single-ended SCSI-2
- NCR 53C720 16-bit Fast-Wide high-voltage differential (HVD) SCSI-2
- Intel 82596DX 10Mb Ethernet controller
- AMD Formac Plus Am79C830 FDDI controller
- WD16C552 parallel, plus additional functionality provided through Cutoff, e.g. Scanjet support
- NS16550A compatible serial
- 512KB EPROM - the Boot ROM
- 8KB EEPROM for storing system configuration status etc.
- Intel 8042 microprocessor controlling:
- battery backed RTC
- system & user timers
- audio generator
- HP-HIL interface
- frontpanel system status LEDs
- Intel 82C501AD Ethernet transceiver
- Mongoose ASIC, EISA bus-adaptor
- CS4215 CODEC for 16-bit stereo audio
Buses
- VSC memory/CPU bus
- GSC system-level I/O bus
- EISA additional I/O expansion bus
- SGC expansion of the mainbus to the SGC expansion cards
- SCSI-2 narrow single-ended bus
- SCSI-2 Fast-Wide high-voltage differential (HVD) main storage I/O bus
Memory
- HP proprietary memory modules
- 735: 8-32MB modules (most 64MB are unsupported and/or would not fit mechanically)
- 755: 8-64MB modules
- 12 sockets
- 735: 16MB onboard, 400MB (12×32+16) maximum
- 755: 768MB (12×64) maximum
- Memory has to be installed in pairs, from bank 0 to the outside on
both sides equally:
.______________. to backplane | |________________. | | | | | | | | | ##### | | | | | | | | | | | | | | #CPU# | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ##### | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 5 4 3 2 1 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 | |_______________________________| \ /
Expansion
- 735:
- One SGC (DIO-II formfactor) expansion slot
- One EISA slot
- One daughter card slot for:
- A2665A - FDDI SAS daughter card with MIC connector
- A2658A - AUI Ethernet daughter card
- A2831A - ThinLAN Ethernet daughter card
- 755:
- Two SGC (DIO-II formfactor) expansion slots
- Four EISA slots
- See SGC expansion-cards
- See EISA expansion-cards
Drives
- 735: one tray for either two 3.5″ SCSI 68-pin Fast-Wide HVD or 50-pin narrow SE hard drives. Installed tray varies from model to model, 735/99 more often had the SE tray whereas the /125 models commonly had the F/W HVD tray.
- 755: one tray for two half-height 5.25″ SCSI drives and two trays for one full-height 5.25″ SCSI drive each
External Connectors
- 50-pin HD SCSI-2 single-ended external
- 68-pin HD SCSI-3 Fast-Wide high-voltage differential HVD external
- Two standard RS232C serial
- DB25 parallel
- 735: 15-pin AUI or 10Base2 BNC Ethernet or FDDI SAS MIC connector
- 755: 15-pin AUI & 10Base2 BNC Ethernet connectors
- RGB BNC, depends on installed framebuffer, if at all
- HP-HIL connector for input devices
- Five phone jacks (microphone, headphones, line-in, line-out and speaker) (optional on 755)
References
- 735/755 LED error codes
- Model 735 Service Handbook (PDF, 7.6MB)
Operating Systems
- HP-UX: every release from 10.01-10.20 works.
- 10.20: runs very nice on them.
- 11.00: the version from March 2000 should be the last one that runs on these machines. Newer install CDs may even do not start at all. General Patch Releases from a date later than 03/2000 could make your installation unusable. 11.00 on these machines is completely unsupported from HP though.
- 11i: 11i is officially unsupported on these systems, depending on the date of the installation CDs it might be possible to install 11i on 735/755s though. It seems the system is stable once up and running, however the patches have to be carefully reviewed as some of the SCSI patches might break the system. If booting the install CD does not work it is possible to set up an Ignite-UX install server on another HP box and netboot from that.
- NeXTSTEP: Version 3.3 works fine, but the 53C720 Fast-Wide HVD SCSI subsystem and the FDDI boards are NOT supported.
- Linux: works.
- OpenBSD: works fine (the 53C720 Fast-Wide HVD SCSI controller is supported since release 4.2).
- NetBSD: experimental support as of 5/2005, but the 53C720 Fast-Wide HVD SCSI controller is not supported.
Benchmarks
| Model | SPEC95, int | SPEC95, fp | SPEC95 rate, int |
SPEC95 rate, fp |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| /99 | 3.22 | 4.06 | 29.4 | 35.8 |
| /125 | 3.97 | 4.61 | 36.3 | 40.9 |
Compare these with other results on the Benchmarks page.