HP 9000 712 Workstations

Quick Facts
Introduced 1994-1995
Period Maturity (III)
Series 700 Series
CPU PA-7100LC 32-bit
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
I/O Ethernet
SCSI
serial
parallel
VGA
2 PS/2
audio

HP 9000 712 are low-cost Unix and PA-RISC workstations from HP, released in 1994 as second PA-RISC pizza-box system for HP-UX Unix computing, after the early-1990s HP 9000 705 and 710 workstations.

HP 9000 712
© Hewlett Packard 1997

HP’s design goal for 712 workstations was to reach the performance of 1992-era workstations such as the HP 9000 735 at a fraction of their fabrication costs, which it achieved by a much streamlined system design.

HP 712 workstations used a simplified and highly integrated PA-RISC design from HP with many integrated components, the 712 pizza-box was one of the smallest Unix workstations of the 90s, similar to Sun SPARCstations. HP 712 had 2D hardware accelerators for graphical user interfaces and X11 and were popularly used for Unix desktop publishing and office.

The beautiful NeXTSTEP PA-RISC operating system, based on Mach and Unix, was designed for and on HP 9000 712 workstations.

HP 9000 712
© Hewlett Packard 1995

HP 712 were very popular in 1990s technical disciplines, graphics, software and multimedia development. Especially the 712/60 was competitively priced at the time as an entry-level RISC Unix system compared other Unix RISC products. HP 712 offered outstanding performance at new low prices with integrated graphics, standard I/O, stereo audio, solid integer performance for Unix applications.

Together with other HP 9000 computers, 712 workstations were part of the mid-1990s US Navy TAC-4 program for tactical computers. This led to 712 workstations being used widely as TAC-4 Desktop Computer throughout US Navy and military vessels. HP 9000 712 were the basis for other systems like the newer, LASI-based 715 workstations and the SAIC Galaxy 1100, the first PA-RISC portable.

In 1996, HP sold a 712/60 as HP Developer’s Station bundled with HP SoftBench and ANSI C development environment. HP later on reduced pricing of 712 and 715 workstations quite aggressively in 1997, by up to 50 percent (to $7,060 for 712/100) when newer HP Visualize B-Class became available.

Also around 1996, HP and Agilent sold a the HP 16505A Prototype Analyzer, which was a 712/60 re-purposed as interface and GUI option for HP 16500C Logic Analysis systems. The 16505A unit could be connected to logic analyzers and probes – it seems like a special connection (looks like SCSI connector).

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System

Processors

HP 9000 712 workstations use 32-bit PA-RISC processors, the highly-integrated PA-7100LC in three clock speeds. Mainboards differed between the 60/80 MHz and 100 MHz models.

System CPU Speed L1 cache
HP 9000 712/60 PA-7100LC PA-RISC 32-bit 60 MHz 1 KB on-chip and 64 KB off-chip
HP 9000 712/80 PA-7100LC PA-RISC 32-bit 80 MHz 1 KB on-chip and 256 KB off-chip
HP 9000 712/100 PA-7100LC PA-RISC 32-bit 100 MHz 1 KB on-chip and 256 KB off-chip

Chipset

System design was based on HP LASI, a custom and highly integrated HP chipset, which combines many functions and I/O on a single chip. Together with the on-CPU memory controller (MIOC), this resulted in a very integrated system design.

HP LASI was primarily designed for cost-reduction while still providing all required I/O functions in a single chip. It was used in most PA-7100LC and PA-7300LC systems. 

 _________       ______
|PA-7100LC|_____|Artist|______________[VGA]
|_________| ||  |______|
  __|__  |  ||
 |Cache| |  ||     _ _ LASI ASIC _ _
 |_____| |  ||            ______
 ______  |  ||    |  ____|i82596|___|_[10Mb Ethernet]
|Memory|_|  ||       ||  |______|
|______|    ||    |  ||   ______    |
 ___        ||       ||__|53C710|_____[8-bit SCSI-2]
|ROM|_______||    |  ||  |______|   |
|___|       ||_______||   ____
 ________   ||    |  ||__|PS/2|_____|_[Keyboard/Mouse]
|GIO-slot|__||       ||  |____|
|________| GSC    |  ||   ______    |
 _________           ||__|16550A|_____[Serial]
|TSIO-slot|__     |  ||  |______|   |
|_________| |        ||   ______
            |     |  ||__|37C65C|___|_[Floppy]
            |        ||  |______|
            |     |  ||   ______    |
            |        ||__|16C522|_____[Parallel]
            |     |  ||  |______|   |
            |        ||   _______
            |_____|__||__|Harmony|__|_[Audio]
                     ||  |_______|
                  |  ||   ___       |
                     ||__|RTC|
                  | GSC  |___|      |
                   _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

HP 9000 712 and LASI System Architecture

System buses

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Expansion

Memory

Expansion cards

Storage

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Ports

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Operating systems

Unix was the main operating system for HP 9000 712 with good support for HP-UX between HP-UX 9.07 (1993) and HP-UX 11i (2004) as well as native NeXTSTEP support.

HP 9000 712 played a key role in the open source scene of the 2000s, when HP supported projects like Linux with 712 workstations for kernel development. Most open source PA-RISC operating systems support 712 quite well.

Many research and development operating systems were ported to 712 workstations during the 1990s with broad development support:

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Pictures

712/60

HP 9000 712 HP 9000 712 HP 9000 712 HP 9000 712
HP 9000 712 HP 9000 712 HP 9000 712
HP 9000 712/60, Thomas Schanz 2010-2013, CC BY-SA 4.0

712/100

HP 9000 712 HP 9000 712 HP 9000 712 HP 9000 712
HP 9000 712/100, Thomas Schanz CC BY-SA 4.0

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HP 9000 712
HP and NeXT, HP 712 workstation, 1994

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Dimensions

HP 9000 712 workstations had a small, plastic-based pizzabox case with a weight of 8 kg (17 lb). They have a height of 70 mm, width of 432 mm and depth of 400 mm.

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

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Performance

HP 9000 712 with PA-7100LC processors were quick, entry-level Unix workstations of the mid-1990s, slightly faster than MIPS, Alpha, SPARC and Intel computers from the same time, but usually significantly faster in floating point, in SPEC benchmarks. Intel’s Pentium Pro was eventually much faster than PA-7100LC PA-RISC.

The main competition of HP 9000 712 workstations in the mid-1990s were other, similar-sized Unix workstations like Sun SPARCstation 10 and 20 or entry-level AlphaStations 200 and 255 or SGI Indy and Indigo2, which were usually on par or a bit slower, depending the exact RISC processor. PA-RISC and 712 were still faster than mid-level PCs.

PA-RISC SPEC scores of HP 9000 computers
System CPU SPEC92
int/fp		 SPEC95
int/fp
712/60 PA-7100LC 60 MHz 67.0 85.3 2.08 2.66
712/80 PA-7100LC 80 MHz 97.1 123.3 3.12 3.55
712/100 PA-7100LC 100 MHz 117.2 144.2 3.76 4.06
Based on old SPEC92 and SPEC95 archives
System CPU SPEC92
int/fp		 SPEC95
int/fp
Intel Alder Intel Pentium Pro 150MHz 276.3 220.0 6.08 5.42
HP 9000 C110 PA-7200 120 MHz 167.0 269.0 6.00 8.14
HP 9000 735/125 PA-7150 125 MHz 136.0 201.0 3.97 4.61
DEC Alphastation 250 DEC Alpha 21064A 266MHz 198.6 262.5 4.18 6.27
IBM RS/6000 43P PowerPC 604 100 MHz 128.0 120.2 3.59 3.20
Sun SPARCstation 20 Sun SuperSPARC II 75MHz 125.8 121.2 3.11 3.10
Siemens PCE-5S Intel Pentium 100MHz 96.2 81.2 4.04 2.35
Intel Xpress Intel Pentium 75MHz 89.1 68.5 2.31 2.02
SGI Indigo2 MIPS R4400SC 75MHz 85.9 93.6
IBM RS/6000 250 PowerPC 601 80MHz 77.6 89.4 1.82 2.03
DEC AlphaStation 200 DEC Alpha 21064 100MHz 74.6 95.2 1.48 2.79
SGI IRIS Indigo IP20 MIPS R4000 100MHz 57.6 60.3
Micronics M4P Intel 486DX4 100MHz 51.4 26.6
Sun SPARCstation 10 Sun SuperSPARC 40MHz 50.2 60.2 1.13 1.38
Digital DECstation 5000 MIPS R4000 50MHz 43.2 42.1

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Documentation

Most HP documentation is only available at archive.org and other archives, with most official sources, articles and journals having disappeared in the 2010s.

Manuals

LED messages

Product sheets

Articles

ROM update

There is a firmware update available for HP 9000 712 to the latest version 2.3.

Other

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