HP 9000/705 and 710

Quick Facts
Introduced	1992
Period	Growth (II)
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 simplifide 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 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

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
- 10.20
- 11.00: could work, but unsupported and slow
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

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

↑ up