PA-RISC information - since 1999

No RISC No Fun

OpenPA is an independent technical resource on HP 9000 and PA-RISC computers and operating systems. Information on PA-RISC is published in more than 100 articles on OpenPA since 1999 on PA-RISC computers, architecture and software ecosystem:

  1. Hardware: OpenPA covers HP PA-RISC architecture and processors from the 1980s to 2000s, with most chipsets and system being custom HP RISC designs.
  2. Computers: Many PA-RISC computers were produced by HP: Technical servers and workstations in the HP 9000, Visualize and Integrity ranges.
  3. Operating: Different Unix operating systems have been ported to HP 9000 and PA-RISC: HP-UX, Mach, BSD, Linux and many R&D projects.

Information is based on PA-RISC technical references, handbooks and architecture documents, correlated with disappearing articles and archives. OpenPA is independent of and does not represent HP in any way. Read the news, RSS and OpenPA book.

SAIC Talon PA-RISC Portable Severe Workstations

By Paul Weissmann on 2 December 2024

SAIC apparently produced another PA-RISC portable computer in the mid-1990s: the SAIC Talon. Compared to the well-known boxy Galaxy 1100, the Talon is even more rugged at almost 50 pounds and integrated a 32-bit HP 9000 712 PA-RISC system design into a military portable case.

SAIC Talon
Talon © SAIC 1996

SAIC Talon PA-RISC portables were apparently produced as part of the US Navy TAC-4 program, under which HP provided PA-RISC gear to the Navy, supported by SAIC for rugged computers in severe environments. The prior SAIC Galaxy was already pretty rugged but the Talon added to this with extensive military requirements for shock, sound, rain, airborne and Fungus: No growth.

Also based on HP 9000 712 workstation design, SAIC added PCMCIA for extensions and an EISA bus slot for interfaces, to which a VME adapter could be connected. SAIC Talons are almost unknown today with only very few public information available since then. Talons are mentioned in SAIC websites from 1996 but it remains unclear if and how these computers were actually productized.

Hot Chips Conference: RISC in the 1990s

By Paul Weissmann on 1 December 2024

HOT CHIPS is an IEEE conference on microprocessors and microcomputers, organized yearly since 1989. Almost all cutting edge RISC and computer architectures of the 1990s were presented at HOT CHIPS over the years, and interesting PA-RISC information can be found at the conference in HP presentations between 1991 and 1999.

HOT CHIPS Logo
HOT CHIPS, © IEEE 1998

Most historic HOT CHIPS programs and proceedings are now only available in archives, after having been hosted until the 2010s at official HOT CHIPS. These presentations from older HOT CHIPS still offer an interesting glimpse into the wildly diverse CPU landscape of the 1990s

Some notable PA-RISC presentations at HOT CHIPS, all at archive.org

Summary of HOT CHIPS programs in the RISC era – many slides available at archive.org

  • HOT CHIPS 1 ’89: SPARC, 88k, MIPS R4000, Clipper, Intel i860, RISC FPUs, Motorola 68040, Intel i486, Graphics coprocessors
  • HOT CHIPS 2 ’90: SPARC, MIPS R6000, SPEC, Intel i960, graphics, FPUs, VLIW, Clipper, IBM RS/6000 and POWER
  • HOT CHIPS 3 ’91: SuperSPARC, MIPS R4000, PA-RISC, VLIW, i860, GaA, DSP
  • HOT CHIPS 4 ’92: DEC Alpha, PA-RISC, SPARC, ARM, PCI, APIC, vector, Intel P5
  • HOT CHIPS 5 ’93: Integrated RISC: Alpha 21066, PA-7100LC, integrated graphics, video processors, ARM, PowerPC 601, SGI, ECL
  • HOT CHIPS 6 ’94: Multimedia and video, Alpha 21164, SMP, encryption, Intel i960 and Pentium 100, SH-II, PCI chipsets, PowerPC 604, Motorola 68060
  • HOT CHIPS 7 ’95: Embedded, AMD 29000, MIPS, Pentium Pro, AMD K6, Cyrix x86, SPARC64, PA-8000, Competing Architectures in an x86 World Order, MPEG and graphics hardware, parallel and vector processing, UltraSPARC, MIPS R10000, PowerPC
  • HOT CHIPS 8 ’96: HP PA-8000, DEC 21164, IBM Orca, compilers, DRAMs, ARM, Java, Intel MMX, VLIW multimedia, Permedia and GLINT, S3 Virge
  • HOT CHIPS 9 ’97: Research, Intel 440LX, Digital FX!32, Java, MAX-2, If **I** Were Defining Merced SH4, StrongARM, media and 3D, UltraSparc IIi, Pentium II, PowerPC
  • HOT CHIPS 10 ’98: Alpha 21264, UltraSPARC-III, PA-8500, embedded, IBM S/390, SGI SV1, MPEG and digital TV, VLIW multimedia, 3D accelerators, Intel i740, Permedia 3, AMD 3DNow! and K6-2
  • HOT CHIPS 11 ’99: DSPs, IA64 and Itanium, PowerPC Pulsar, parallel, POWER4, graphics and VLIW, embedded, ARM, Information Appliances in the Home, AMD K7 northbridge, VMware, Ethernet, Intel Streaming SIMD (SSE), Sun MAJC
HOT CHIPS 89 HOT CHIPS 89
HOT CHIPS Agenda ’89 © IEEE

Wanted: Hardcopy COMPCON digests 1982-1999

By Paul Weissmann on 24 November 2024

OpenPA is looking for hardcopy digests of COMPCON, the Computer Conference of IEEE International from the 1980s and 1990s. Physical copies turn up only rarely and most are buried within libraries and could be retired or discarded soon.

Much PA-RISC history was presented at COMPCON conferences and many interesting articles hide in the digests of Intellectual Leverage for the Information Society conferences on the RISC era of the 1980s and 1990s. These articles would be welcome additions to OpenPA information on PA-RISC.

COMPCON
COMPCON
COMPCON
COMPCON © IEEE

We are loooking for conference proceedings of:

  • COMPCON 1982 High technology in the Information Industry;
  • COMPCON 1983 Intellectual Leverage for Information Technology
  • COMPCON 1984 Intellectual Leverage for Driving Technologies
  • COMPCON 1985 Technological Leverage
  • COMPCON 1986 Digest of Papers
  • COMPCON 1987 Intellectual Leverage
  • COMPCON 1988 Intellectual Leverage
  • COMPCON 1989 Intellectual Leverage
  • COMPCON 1990 Intellectual Leverage
  • COMPCON 1991 Intellectual Leverage
  • COMPCON 1992 Intellectual Leverage
  • COMPCON 1993 Intellectual Leverage
  • COMPCON 1994 Intellectual Leverage
  • COMPCON 1995 Technologies for the Information Highway
  • COMPCON 1996 Technologies for the Information Highway
  • COMPCON 1997 Technologies for the Information Highway
  • COMPCON 1998 Digest of Papers
  • COMPCON 1999 Digest of Papers

OpenPA would be glad to take used or surplus hardcopies of COMPCON digests as they become available for our PA-RISC archive and the RISC era. 10x

spectable – SPEC Benchmark results from 2000

By Paul Weissmann on 23 November 2024

SPEC Logo
SPEC, © 2000

The processing power of Unix and RISC computers was often measured by industry benchmarks to compare the speed with other vendors. Frequently used in the 1990s and 2000s were SPEC scores in CPU92, CPU95 and CPU2000 varieties, as quoted in press releases, magazines and websites for comparing CPUs and workstations.

During the 1990s, John DiMarco regularly posted collected SPEC benchmark scores to USEnet groups. His spectable contained SPEC92 and SPEC95 results from many different sources collected over time. Last releases of the table were in late 2000, when official results became more easily available and SPEC switched to SPEC2000.

SPEC Logo
SPEC, © 2000

SPEC, Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, is a non-profit corporation founded in 1988 by workstation vendors to develop fair and useful set of metrics to differentiate Unix and computer systems. SPEC both developed the benchmarks, source code and testing methodology and published the results in regulary publications.

Relevant for PA-RISC are scores from SPEC’s Open Systems Group (OSG) for processor and system benchmarks in an UNIX/NT/VMS environment, including SPEC92, SPEC95 and SPEC2000 integer and FP scores for computing speed and SPEC95 and SPEC2000 rate scores for throughput (SMP capacity).

SPEC scores were always compared to a reference system, a DEC VAX11/780 for CPU92, Sun SPARCstation 10/40 for CPU95 and Sun Ultra 5 for CPU2000.

DiMarco’s spectable disappeared around 20 years ago and is only available anymore on archive.org. Following are excerpted SPEC CPU92 scores for various vendors and CPU architectures from his table, dated Dec 8, 2000.

Some favorite SPECint92 and SPECfp92 scores from VAX over i486 to R8000:

System            CPU        ClkMHz  Cache      SPECint SPECfp  Info  Source
Name              (NUMx)Type ext/in  Ext+I/D      92      92    Date  Obtained
================= ========== ======= ========== ======= ======= ===== =========
DEC VAX11/780     VAX        5       8             1.0     1.0  Jan89 SPEC Ref
DEC VAX4000/60    KA46       22.2    ?            11.1    12.6  Mar93 DECinfo
DEC 3000/300      A21064     30/150  256+8/8      66.2    91.5  Apr93 c.sun.mc
DEC 5000/20       R3000      20      64/64        13.5    18.4  Jun93 DECinfo
DG 5225           2x88100    25      128/128      20.3    12.1  May93 c.sun.hw
HP 712/60         PA7100LC   60      64           67.0    85.3  Jun95 www.hp
HP C110           PA7200     120     256/256     167     269    Dec95 www.hp
HP 897S           PA7100     96      1M/1M        78.3   141.6  Sep92 SPEC news
IBM 340           POWER      33      8/32         27.7    51.9  Oct92 c.arch
Sun SS/IPX        FJMB86903  40      64           21.8    21.5  Nov92 Sunflash
Sun SS20/151      HyperSP    50/150  512+8/0     169.4   208.2  Nov95 SunWorld
SGI PowerIndigo2  R8000      75      2M+16/16    113     269    Oct95 www.sgi
Intel 486DX       80486      50      256+8        30.1    14.0  Oct92 c.arch
Intel Xpress      Pentium    60      256+8/8      70.4    55.1  Mar95 www.intel

There are more archived SPEC CPU92 and CPU95 results from many vendors.

PA-RISC Performance compared to other RISCs

By Paul Weissmann on 18 November 2024

Comparing the speed of CPU architectures is a very complex and sometimes futile undertaking, as the platform around processors might be much more significant than the actual ISA. Still, it is historically interesting to see how different RISC architectures fared against each other in the RISC/Unix world of the 90s.

While PA-RISC processors were usually faster than their competition at the same clock speed, they were expensive to fabricate. Their platform, HP 9000 with PA-RISC and HP-UX, was usually exclusively priced in the 1980s and 1990s, compared to other Unix vendor ecosystems. PA-RISC was thus often used for technical workloads that made use of their strengths in floating point and numerical processing.

PA-8200 Performance
RISC Performance in ’97 © MPR Conference

The main competitors of PA-RISC were other Unix platform vendors with their own RISC architectures: Sun SPARC (Solaris), Digital Alpha (Tru64 and OSF), SGI with MIPS (Irix), and IBM POWER (AIX and others). In the late 1990s, Intel Pentium and P6-based sucessors became also serious competitors (Windows and Linux).

Relative performance between computers and architectures can be compared by benchmark scores like the SPEC suite, often used to benchmark CPU and throughput performance. For the Unix and RISC systems covered here, SPEC95 and SPEC2000 had the greatest match, using the CPU integer (CINT) and floating point (CFP) results.

How PA-RISC fares agains other 1990s RISCs is broken down by PA-RISC processor with a table of SPEC results added with other architectures as comparison.

More HP-RT Real-Time Archaeology

By Paul Weissmann on 15 November 2024

Much more documentation for the relative obscure HP-RT real-time operating system for PA-RISC has been unearthed. HP-RT was an operating for HP 9000 740 VME instrumentation computers, released between 1993 and 1997 to offer real-time functionality for PA-RISC VME computers, POSIX 1003.1 and POSIX 1003.4 compatible.

HP VME and VXI RT
HP VXI RT, © 2000

Documentation includes HP-RT manuals and articles of the HP Integrated Systems Division, now archived in long forgotten websites and hosted at archive.org

HP 744 Configuration
HP VXI RT, © 2000

More documents on HP 74x PA-RISC VME computers also became available, all from HP, now at archive.org

HP-RT and HP 740 VME computers had a rather short shelfspan and were discontinued in 2002 as customers had migrated rapidly elsewhere. Both had many medical and military uses for imaging, radar and signals.

Research Operating Systems of the 1990s on PA-RISC

By Paul Weissmann on 14 November 2024

The golden 1990s were a period of experimentation and change in the computing world. Many different hardware architectures (RISC, CISC, VLIW) and platforms (Sun, DEC, IBM, HP) competed for hardware buyers, as did operating systems. PA-RISC was right in the middle of this, though HP itself was rather conservative.

Unix was the operating system of choice for PA-RISC since the 1980s with HP-UX in many different versions for HP 9000 computers. Soon academia became interested in the new PA-RISC architecture for newer operating system ports and research. The University of Utah and the Open Group (OSF) played major roles in the 90s in this.

First was Utah’s HPBSD, an orthodox 4.3BSD, first ported to HP 9000 m68k machines, later extended to 4.4BSD and PA-RISC; a rather complete but very exclusive operating system. This was followed by research projects with Mach microkernel, first Mach 3/UX by Bob Wheeler in 1991, later extended to Mach 4/Lites in 1994.

Open Group
Open Group RI, © 1998

OSF/1 Unix was also ported to PA-RISC, first by HP in 1990 with early OSF/1 1.0 using Mach 2.0 microkernel. Later on, the Open Group Research Institute (OSF RI) ported OSF/1 semi-commercially to PA-RISC as MK-PA, a rather complete system but exclusively licensed. MK-PA was pretty performant compared to HP-UX, especially in high-user workloads, with good HP-UX compatibility (for Framemaker and Mosaic).

MkLinux OSF
MkLinux, OSF, © 1998

Based on earlier Mach and MK-PA work, a MkLinux port to PA-RISC was released in 1997. MkLinux was a project from Open Group and Apple, based on Mach microkernel and often used for Apple PowerPC computers in the 1990s. With HP support, MkLinux was ported to PA-RISC was a first, snapshop release in 1997. MkLinux on PA-RISC (HPPA) was never a formal MkLinux release; it was a rather complete operating system with limited hardware support and stability however.

Chorus PA-RISC
Chorus PA-RISC © 1994

Another micro-kernel operating system was Chorus by INRIA, ported as research project to PA-RISC in 1990 at the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI). It was based on Chorus v3.3/MiX with very limited hardware support and functionality, later extended to v3.4.

Some of these systems were stable alternatives to HP-UX but had very limited distribution and strict licensing. The research operating systems for PA-RISC with better availability were in turn limited in hardware support, stability and performance. This was mitigated in the early 2000s with mainline Linux and OpenBSD.

Year HP-UX NeXTSTEP HPBSD Mach 3 Mach 4 OSF/1 MkLinux Linux OpenBSD NetBSD
Type Unix Research Open Source
1989 █ █
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996 █ █
1997 █ █
1998
1999
2000 █ █

25 Years of Linux and OpenBSD on PA-RISC

By Paul Weissmann on 11 November 2024

The Linux and OpenBSD ports to PA-RISC turned 25 this year. Both popular Unix-like open source operating systems started PA-RISC development at the turn of the century, when HP PA-RISC computers had been largely confined to commercial Unix with HP-UX and closed research systems based on Mach.

Not many options were available for second hand PA-RISC computers in the 1990s. Earlier ports of alternative operating systems HPBSD, Mach and MkLinux to PA-RISC were very limited in distribution, hardware support and usability.

Puffin Group
The Puffin Group, © 1999

In the late 1990s, PA-RISC was the last big RISC architecture without a mainline Linux port. Initial work on PA-RISC Linux started in 1999 at The Puffin Group, a Linux consulting company. HP supported the project early through its new Open Source Solutions Operation unit with documentation, code, hardware and HP developers. Runnable code and kernels followed soon and Debian Linux added PA-RISC in 2002 and Gentoo a bit later.

OpenBSD NYCBUG
NYCBUG 2005, Michael Shalayeff, slides

OpenBSD was the first BSD Unix open source port to PA-RISC with OpenBSD/hppa, which was started by the late Michael Shalayeff in 1999 in NYC. It was based on information and code from previous Mach porting efforts Mach4/Lites and MkLinux. The first functional OpenBSD/hppa release was 2004 after lots of efforts, still with some limitations.

Nowadays, Linux has the broadest support for PA-RISC computers, both 32-bit and 64-bit. Besides the retro touch from period-correct late-90s HP-UX and NeXTSTEP, both Linux and OpenBSD offer a more modern Unix experience with semi-current device drivers and software options. HP-UX, especially on 64-bit system, is probably more stable and optimized, but lacks much support for software of the two last decades.

HP 9000 Pizzabox Computers with PA-RISC

By Paul Weissmann on 9 November 2024

During the early 1990s, so-called pizzabox workstations were very popular. Unix workstations had usually been bulky and cumbersome affairs since the 1980s, so smaller, desktop-compatible boxes were a welcome change. HP produced two PA-RISC pizzaboxes in its lineup: HP 9000 705/710 and the ever popular HP 9000 712.

HP 9000 712 HP 9000 712 HP 9000 712 HP 9000 710
HP 9000 712 and 710, Thomas Schanz 2010-2013, CC BY-SA 4.0

HP 9000 705/710 were the first small PA-RISC workstations, released in 1992. They used 32-bit PA-7000 PA-RISC processors and used a simplified version of the Snakes ASP system design, the first PA-RISC workstations. 705 and 710 were shipped with HP-UX Unix and supported many early-1990s Mach-based R&D systems.

HP 9000 712 were a 1994 low-cost Unix and PA-RISC workstation design that should offer performance of 1992 workstations at a fraction of their price. 712 used new PA-7100LC integrated 32-bit PA-RISC processors and LASI chipset. They were a widely popular HP 9000 product in the mid-90s, used with HP Unix but also beautiful NeXTSTEP, version 3.3 of which was developed on and for HP 9000 712.

Both 705/710 and 712 were often used for GUI and 2D technical design as well as system and network administration of HP 9000 landscapes. Their performance was soon eclipsed in the 2000s by 64-bit PA-RISC workstations and Intel PCs, so they became widely (and cheaply) available second-hand with good open source support.

ATI and nVIDIA Graphics for PA-RISC and Itanium

By Paul Weissmann on 13 October 2024

HP used a few third-party 3D accelerators on its PA-RISC and Itanium Unix workstations: Various ATI FireGL and nVIDIA Quadro AGP video cards were used by HP.

For HP-UX on PA-RISC, HP supported HP FireGL cards in firmware and X11. HP FireGL cards were modified ATI cards and GPUs with HP providing drivers for HP-UX for 64-bit c8000 workstations running HP-UX 11.00 and higher:

  • HP FireGL-UX PCI, IBM GT1000 and RC1000 with 128 MB DDR
  • ATI FireGL T2 AGP 8X, RV350 with 128 MB DDR
  • ATI FireGL X1 AGP 8X, R300GL with 256 MB DDR
  • ATI FireGL X3 AGP 8X, R420 with 256 MB GDDR3

For HP-UX and Linux on Itanium, HP supported ATI and nVIDIA AGP cards in workstation firmware and provided drivers for X11 in Itanium zx6000 and zx2000:

  • ATI FireGL4 AGP 4X, GT1000 and RC1000 with 128MB DDR (HP-UX)
  • ATI FireGL X1 AGP 8X, R300GL with 256MB DDR (HP-UX)
  • ATI FireGL Z1 AGP 8X, R300GL with 128MB DDR (HP-UX)
  • ATI Radeon 7000 AGP, RV100 with 32MB DDR (HP-UX and Linux)
  • nVIDIA Quadro2 EX AGP, NV11GL with 32MB SDR (Linux)
  • nVIDIA Quadro4 900XGL AGP 4X, NV25 with 128MB DDR (Linux)
  • nVIDIA Quadro4 980XGL AGP 8, NV28GL with 128MB DDR (Linux)

PA-RISC Video Adapters: CRX to FireGL

By Paul Weissmann on 10 October 2024

HP 9000 and PA-RISC workstations were shipped almost exlusively with custom HP graphics adapters, which HP designed for a variety of different use cases, from simple 1990s 2D design to advanced CAD/CAM, 3D modeling and scientific design.

HP Graphics

The page on PA-RISC graphics adapters has been split into several articles for specific HP video adapter groups. HP PA-RISC video adapters used a variety of HP video chips and GPUs in different buses, some cards were immensely expensive (>$20k).

Full support for PA-RISC graphics cards is available only in HP-UX, with incomplete support in other and open source systems, especially for 3D and acceleration.

Unix Games on HP-UX

By Paul Weissmann on 6 October 2024

While HP-UX was mostly used for engineering and design applications during the PA-RISC heydays, several Unix games run on HP-UX, ported in the 1990s.

SimCity HP-UX
Simcity on HP-UX © Tenox

This included many iconic 3D games from the early 1990s, compiled with OpenGL but also some other, semi-commercial ports of well-known games. Many freeware games were available for Unix and often could be compiled on various versions of HP-UX.

The roster for commercial games and their ports was interesting, with the followings games known to be working on HP-UX.

More RISC Laptops: UltraBook and Hitachi

By Paul Weissmann on 15 September 2024

Two more RISC laptops have been added to the RISC Laptop Archive: UltraSPARC-based RDI UltraBook and the rare PA-RISC Hitachi 3050RX 100C from Japan.

Hitachi 3050RX 100C
© RDI 1996

Hitachi 3050RX 100C were Japanese RISC laptops for Unix computing, introduced in 1994. Hitachi was a PRO consortium member for HP PA-RISC computers, the 100C was based on custom Hitachi PA/50L processor.

They were possibly compatible with HP 9000 PA-RISC workstations but used custom Hitachi HI-UX/WE2 Unix, a modified HP-UX, for for multi-media processing of the 1990s. It is unclear if the 100C was a laptop with battery or portable computer with AC.

RDI UltraBook
© Tadpole-RDI 2000

RDI UltraBooks were SPARC64-based RISC laptops for mobile Unix computing, introduced by RDI in 1997 to be used as a portable Solaris workstation for training, demonstrations, exhibitions and portable deployment (C&C).

UltraBooks were binary compatible with Sun workstations for standard Sun Solaris Unix. They were designed for government and security agencies, their removable drives were marketed as a plus for classified environments.

RISC Laptop Archive from the 1990s

By Paul Weissmann on 8 September 2024

Byte 1994
© Byte 1994

Another slight detour from PA-RISC content on OpenPA: The RISC Laptop Archive on the various RISC-based laptops sold throughout the 1990s.

Technical computing in the 1990s was mostly done on RISC workstations with Unix operating systems and specialized applications. For mobile use cases, some popular Unix vendors built RISC laptops.

Often based on contemporary Unix workstations, these RISC laptops were often marketed for government and military uses such as command, technical analysis and surveillance. The RISC Laptop Archive will sort and consolidate the information

Added 8 September:

Still to be covered: ALPHAbook, SPARCbook, Ultrabook, Viper and others.

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