HP 9000/705 and 710

Quick Facts
Introduced	1992
Period	Growth (II)
Series	700 Series
CPU	1 PA-7000 35/50 MHz
Caches	96 KB L1
RAM	64 MB
Design	ASP
Drives	2 SCSI
Expansion	None
Bandwidth	CPU 200 MB/s Sys 100 MB/s
I/O	10E SCSI 2 serial parallel VGA HIL audio

The HP 9000/705 and HP 9000/710 were the first small PA-RISC workstations and simplified versions of the Snakes 720, 730 and 750 workstations in a smaller case. The basic technical design was taken over taken over with some changes:

Smaller Instruction/Data caches on the processor
Lower CPU clock rate
Different connection to the memory subsystem
Integration of graphics, SCSI, Ethernet subsystem onto a single mainboard
Reduced expansion possibilities
The 710 was the first audio capable Series 700 workstation.

The HP 9000 705 and 710 were marketed to compete with the early 1990s low end of the workstation market -- between $5,000 and $10,000, including Sun's lower cost SPARC offerings like Sparcstation IPX but also IBM's RS/6000 220.

Model	Introduced	Price
705	1992	$8,990
710	1992	$12,490

HP introduced another pizzabox-sized workstations a few years later with the 1994 HP 9000 712 workstation, based on the newer 32-bit PA-7100LC.

System architecture

Processors

Model	CPU	Speed	L1 Cache
705	PA-7000	35 MHz	96 KB off-chip
710	PA-7000	50 MHz	96 KB off-chip

Chipset

ASP chipset
Viper memory and I/O controller, low-cost version implemented in two chips
NCR 53C700 8-bit single-ended SCSI-2
Intel 82596DX 10 Mbit Ethernet controller
Audio 8-bit mono PSB2160 CODEC
Other I/O (serial, parallel, i8042)

System buses

PBus processor/memory bus, 200 MB/s at 50 MHz (710), 140 MB/s at 35 MHz (705)
VSC main system bus, 100 MB/s at 25 MHz (710), 70 MB/s at 17.5 MHz (705)
GSC system-level I/O bus
SCSI-2 narrow single-ended bus

Memory

HP-proprietary 72-pin SIMMs
Eight sockets
16 MB (4×4) minimum, 64 MB maximum

Memory has to installed in quartets:
first in the even slots (0, 2, 4, 6), then in the odd slots (1, 3, 5, 7):

	    front
.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.
|  ext.      int.       ###|
|  drive     drive      ###|
|                       ###|
|                       ###|
|                       ###|
| 3 x-----x  7 x-----x  ###|
| 2 x-----x  6 x-----x  ###|
| 1 x-----x  5 x-----x  ###|
| 0 x-----x  4 x-----x  ###|
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
	     back

Expansion slots

No expansion slots

Storage

SCSI 3.5″ 50-pin Narrow SE hard drive
SCSI half-height 5.25″ 50-pin Narrow SE drive, external accessible

External ports

SCSI-2 50-pin single-ended
Two serial RS232C DB9
Parallel DB25
15-pin AUI 10 Mbit & 10Base2 BNC Ethernet
VGA HD15
HP-HIL connector for input devices
Two phone jacks (microphone, headphones)

Operating systems

HP-UX
- 11.00: could work, but unsupported and slow
- 10.20
- 9.0
- 8.0: from version 8.07
Linux
OpenBSD
Research: HPBSD
Research: Mach 4/Lites
Research: MkLinux
(710 only) Research: OSF MK-PA

Benchmarks

Model	SPEC92 int	SPEC92 fp	SPEC95 int	SPEC95 fp
705	21.9	33.0
710	31.6	47.6	0.99	1.44

Comparison to SPEC benchmark data from other contemporary Unix workstations:

Based on old SPEC92 and SPEC95 archives
Model	CPU	SPEC92 int	SPEC92 fp	SPEC95 int	SPEC95 fp
DEC AlphaStation 200	DEC Alpha 21064 100MHz	74.6	95.2	1.48	2.79
Digital DECpc XL	Intel Pentium 66MHz	51.6	47.5
Sun SPARCstation 10	Sun SuperSPARC 40MHz	50.2	60.2	1.13	1.38
Digital DECstation 5000	MIPS R4000 50MHz	43.2	42.1
IBM RS/6000 355	IBM POWER 41MHz	40.7	83.3
Siemens PCE-4C	Intel 486DX2 66MHz	35.8
Motorola 8000	Motorola 88100 33MHz	27.7	18.8

References

Articles

High-Performance Design for Low-Cost PA-RISC Desktops (.pdf) pp. 55-63 Craig Fink et al (August 1992: Hewlett-Packard Journal)
Hewlett unveils low-cost workstations, UPI Archives, May 12 1992

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