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PA-RISC information - since 1999

HP 9000/712

Quick Facts
Introduced 1994-1995
Period Maturity (III)
CPU 1 PA-7100LC
60-100 MHz
Caches 64-256 KB L1
RAM 128 MB(/60, /80)
192 MB (/100)
Design LASI
Drives 1 SCSI
1 FD
Expansion 1 GIO
1 TSIO
Bandwidth Cache 480 MB/s
System 128 MB/s
I/O 10E
SCSI
serial
parallel
VGA
2 PS/2
audio

The HP 9000 712 workstations were a new, low-cost approach from HP for PA-RISC workstations and the second pizza-box sized system after the 705 and 710 workstations.

The design goal from HP for the 32-bit HP 9000/712 workstation was to reach performance levels of 1992-era workstations and servers such HP 9000 735 workstation, at a fraction of their fabrication costs. Everything is rather simplified and small, the case is one of the smallest Unix workstation cases, similar to the Sun SPARCstation 10 and 20 cases.

The 712 workstation was one of the so-called pizza-box computers of that era and was geared towards graphical user interfaces with the X Window environment. Use cases were 2D graphics and multimedia design, for which it had hardware accelerators.

The HP 9000 712 and its architecture was the basis for other systems — the newer, LASI-based 715 workstations were very similar, the SAIC Galaxy 1100, the first PA-RISC portable, was based on it as well as some measurement and control computers, such as the Agilent HP 16505A Prototype Analyzer.

Model Introduced Price
712/60 1994 $4,400
712/80i 1994 $8,820
712/100 1995 $15,100

The 712 became hugely popular in the 1990s in technical disciplines as well as in graphics, software and early (90s!) multi-media development. Especially the 712/60 was competitively priced during that time as an entry-level RISC Unix system, compared both to HP offerings as well as Unix RISC computers from the competition.

In the US Navy TAC-4 program for tactical computers from the mid-1990s, the HP 9000 712 was used widely as TAC-4 Desktop Computer throughout the US Navy and military vessels, together with other PA-RISC systems from the TAC-4 contract.

In the civilian world, the HP 9000 712 workstations later on became very popular in the hobbyist and open source scene of the 2000s due to their wide distribution and handy size that could easily be used at home.

System architecture

Processors

Model CPU Speed L1 Cache
712/60 PA-7100LC 60 MHz 1 KB on-chip and 64 KB off-chip
712/80 PA-7100LC 80 MHz 1 KB on-chip and 256 KB off-chip
712/100 PA-7100LC 100 MHz 1 KB on-chip and 256 KB off-chip

Chipset

» View a system-level ASCII-illustration of the chipset.

System buses

Memory

Expansion slots

Storage

External ports

Operating systems

Benchmarks

Model SPEC92, int SPEC92, fp SPEC95, int SPEC95, fp SPEC95
rate, int
SPEC95
rate, fp
712/60 67.0 85.3 2.08 2.66 18.7 23.9
712/80 97.1 123.3 3.12 3.55 28.1 32.0
712/100 117.2 144.2 3.76 4.06 33.8 36.3

Dimensions

Height Width Depth Weight
70mm 432mm 400mm 8kg

References

Manuals

Articles

ROM update

There is an firmware update available for the 712, which contains the latest version 2.3.

Other

Pictures © Hewlett Packard, scans from product brochures, from hpmuseum.net and 1000bit.it

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