HP 9000/735 and 755
| Quick Facts | |
|---|---|
| Introduced | 1992 |
| Period | Growth (II) |
| CPU | 1 PA-7100 99 MHz/ 1 PA-7150 125 MHz |
| Caches | 512 KB L1 |
| RAM | 400 MB (735) 768 MB (755) |
| Design | ASP2 |
| Drives | 2 SCSI (735) 4 SCSI (755) |
| Expansion | 1 SGC, 1 EISA, 1 spec (735) 2 SGC, 4 EISA (755) |
| Bandwidth | ? |
| I/O | 10E (or FDDI on 735) 2 SCSI 2 serial parallel HIL audio |
The HP 9000 735 and 755 were powerful technical and graphical PA-RISC workstations from the early 1990s. They use 32-bit PA-RISC 1.1 PA-7100 or PA-7150 processors — the latter in the fast (and expensive) 735/125 and 755/125 versions with 125 MHz.
Both 735 (desktop) and 755 (tower) have a solid and heavy desk-side case built with separate modules for I/O and CPU.
These boards, along with EISA cages and the storage subsystem are built into so-called sliders
that can be removed separately from the system.
The 735 and 755 have similar cases and architecture as their predecessors HP 9000/730 and 750. They support a large set of I/O buses, expansion options and drives with updated design.
The 735 was widely used as a FDDI node in Convex clusters and the 735/125 was a rather fast 1990s RISC workstations plus one of the fastest ever running NeXTSTEP.
| Model | Introduced | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 735/99 | 1992 | $37,395 |
| 735/125 | 1992 | |
| 755/99 | 1992 | $58,995 |
| 755/125 | 1992 |
System architecture
Processors
| Model | CPU | Speed | L1 Cache |
|---|---|---|---|
| 735/99 | PA-7100 | 99 MHz | 256/256 KB off-chip Instruction/Data |
| 755/99 | PA-7100 | 99 MHz | 256/256 KB off-chip Instruction/Data |
| 735/125 | PA-7150 | 125 MHz | 256/256 KB off-chip Instruction/Data |
| 755/125 | PA-7150 | 125 MHz | 256/256 KB off-chip Instruction/Data |
Chipset
- ASP2 chipset
- Viper memory and I/O controller
- Cutoff ASIC, interfacing with memory (Viper) and I/O buses, provides address decoding, bus arbitration and interrupts
- Shortstop ASIC, coordinates data communication between the I/O buses and the mainbus
- NCR 53C700 8-bit single-ended SCSI-2
- NCS 53C720 16-bit Fast-Wide high-voltage differential (HVD) SCSI-2
- Intel 82596DX 10 Mbit Ethernet controller
- AMD Formac Plus Am79C830 FDDI controller
- Other I/O (serial, parallel, i8042)
- Intel 82350 EISA bus adapter chipset (EISA to GSC)
- Audio 16-bit CS4215 CODEC
System buses
- PBus processor/memory bus, 66 MHz on 735/99 and 755/99 (264 MB/s)
- VSC main system bus
- GSC system-level I/O bus
- EISA additional I/O expansion bus
- SGC expansion of the mainbus to the SGC expansion cards
- SCSI-2 narrow single-ended bus
- SCSI-2 Fast-Wide high-voltage differential (HVD) main storage I/O bus
Memory
- HP proprietary memory modules, same as 720, 730 and 750, and the Nova servers
- 8-32 MB modules
- 755 supports 64 MB modules
- 12 sockets
- 735 16 MB onboard, 400 MB maximum
- 755 768 MB maximum
- Memory has to be installed in pairs, from bank 0 to the outside
.______________. to backplane | |________________. | | | | | | | | | ##### | | | | | | | | | | | | | | #CPU# | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ##### | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 5 4 3 2 1 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 | |_______________________________| \ /
Expansion slots
- 735:
- One SGC in DIO-II formfactor
- One EISA slot
- One special daughter card slot for:
- A2665A - FDDI SAS daughter card with MIC connector
- A2658A - AUI Ethernet daughter card
- A2831A - ThinLAN Ethernet daughter card
- 755:
- Two SGC slots in DIO-II formfactor
- Four EISA slots
Storage
- 735: one tray for either two 3.5″ SCSI 68-pin Fast-Wide HVD or 50-pin narrow SE hard drives.
- 755: one tray for two half-height 5.25″ SCSI drives and two trays for one full-height 5.25″ SCSI drive each
External ports
- SCSI-2 50-pin single-ended external
- SCSI-3 68-pin Fast-Wide high-voltage differential HVD external
- Two standard RS232C serial
- DB25 parallel
- 735 15-pin AUI or 10Base2 BNC Ethernet or FDDI SAS MIC connector
- 755 15-pin AUI & 10Base2 BNC Ethernet connectors
- RGB BNC, depends on installed framebuffer, if at all
- HP-HIL connector for input devices
- Five phone jacks (microphone, headphones, line-in, line-out and speaker)
Operating systems
- HP-UX 10.20, 11.00 and 11i v1 (both unsupported)
- NeXTSTEP
- Linux
- OpenBSD
- NetBSD
- Research: HPBSD
- Research: Mach 4/Lites
- Research: MkLinux
- Research: OSF MK-PA
Benchmarks
| Model | SPEC95, int | SPEC95, fp | SPEC95 rate, int |
SPEC95 rate, fp |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| /99 | 3.22 | 4.06 | 29.4 | 35.8 |
| /125 | 3.97 | 4.61 | 36.3 | 40.9 |
References
Manuals
- HP Apollo 9000 Series 700 Model 735 Workstations (PDF, 7.6 MB, Hewlett Packard 1992)