PA-RISC information - since 1999

HP 9000 720, 730 and 750

Quick Facts
Introduced 1991
Period Growth (II)
Series 700 Series
CPU PA-7000 32-bit
50/66 MHz
Caches 384-512 KB
RAM 272 MB (730)
768 MB (750)
Design ASP
Drives 2 SCSI (720/730)
4 SCSI (750)
Expansion 1 SGC, 1 EISA (720/730)
2 SGC, 4 EISA (750)
I/O Ethernet
SCSI
2 serial
parallel
HIL
Unix World 1991

HP 9000 720, 730 and 750 were the first dedicated 32-bit PA-RISC workstations, released in 1991. Called Snakes, they were based on the first PA-RISC 1.1 processor, the PA-7000 (PCX-S), which was designed to power low cost high performance workstations.

The Snake workstations were designed for graphics and technical computing, so many I/O controllers and interfaces were integrated into the system, such as NCR SCSI, HP graphics and Intel Ethernet networking.

Unix World 1991

The new look industrial design of 720 and 730 workstations was done by ZibaDesign and Roche-Harkins as a design framework for a new family of workstations. The cases were very solid and used interlocking modules, sliders, for I/O components such as storage, which connected to the main I/O board with a short external cable. 720 and 730 share the same backplane and I/O board which could be upgraded through the exchange of the CPU system board.

Unix World 1991

HP 9000 720, 730 and 750 were widely used by the US Navy through the TAC-3 (Tactical Advanced Computer) framework for military applications, including electronic intelligence gathering (ELINT).

Later HP 9000/735 workstations share a similar case and system setup as the Snakes: 720 and 730 CPU and I/O boards can be swapped for 735 boards for a system upgrade, and vice versa (735 I/O boards do not work with 720 CPU boards).

Especially the more affordable 720 and 730 workstations were widely used in the Unix world of the 1990s, in academia and industry for technical design and computing. Due to their popularity, many operating systems run on Snakes workstations and were ported to it, including research and development projects such as OSF/1 and a variety of Mach.

Architecture

Processors

System CPU Speed L1 cache
HP 9000 720 PA-7000 PA-RISC 32-bit 50 MHz 384 KB off-chip
HP 9000 730 PA-7000 PA-RISC 32-bit 66 MHz 384 KB off-chip
HP 9000 750 PA-7000 PA-RISC 32-bit 66 MHz 512 KB off-chip

Chipset

System buses

Expansion

Memory

I/O slots

Storage

I/O ports

Operating systems

Pictures

HP 9000 720 HP 9000 720 HP 9000 720 HP 9000 720
HP 9000 720 HP 9000 720 HP 9000 720 HP 9000 720
HP 9000 720, Thomas Schanz 2013, CC BY-SA 4.0

Benchmarks

Based on old SPEC92 and SPEC95 archives
System CPU SPEC92
int
SPEC92
fp
SPEC95
int
SPEC95
fp
HP 9000 720 PA-7000 50 MHz 36.4 58.2 1.20 2.00
HP 9000 730 PA-7000 66 MHz 47.8 75.4 1.50 2.30
HP 9000 750 PA-7000 66 MHz 48.1 75.0 1.50 2.30

Compared to SPEC benchmark data, HP 9000 720, 730 and 750 had similar speed to other contemporary Unix workstations and were faster than Intel 486DX2 and level with Pentium at the same clock but significantly faster in floating point.

Based on old SPEC92 and SPEC95 archives
System CPU SPEC92
int
SPEC92
fp
SPEC95
int
SPEC95
fp
HP 9000 755/125 PA-7150 125 MHz 136.0 201.0 3.97 4.61
Intel Intel Pentium 75MHz 89.1 68.5 2.31 2.02
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
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 16.1
Motorola 8000 Motorola 88100 33MHz 27.7 18.8
SGI IRIS Indigo IP12 MIPS R3000 33MHz 22.4 24.2
DEC 5000/33 MIPS R3000 33MHz 20.9 23.4
HP 9000 425e Motorola 68040 25MHz 12.2 9.3
Digital VAX4000 DEC KA46 22MHz 11.1 12.6

Documentation

Manuals

LED messages

Product sheets

Articles

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