HP 9000/E-Class
| Quick Facts | |
|---|---|
| Introduced | 1994-1995 |
| Period | Maturity (III) |
| Series | 800 Series |
| CPU | 1 PA-7100LC 48-96 MHz |
| Caches | 64 KB-1 MB L1 |
| RAM | 512 MB |
| Design | LASI |
| Drives | 5 SCSI |
| Expansion | 2 HP-PB |
| Bandwidth | System 128 MB/s I/O 32 MB/s |
| I/O | 10E SCSI MUX parallel |
The E-Class are PA-RISC servers from the HP 9000 800 series sold in the mid-1990s as replacements for older F and G-Class Nova servers. Designed by HP‘s technical server division for reduced manufacturing cost, they were closely aligned with the workstation HP 9000/712 even though still on a distinct 800 series system architecture for servers.
HP 9000 E-Class servers and 712 workstations were complementary products – the E-Class as central database compute servers with the closely aligned 712 as client workstations.
The E-Class case was taken over almost unchanged from the earlier F-Class servers, with the CPU, memory and many I/O systems being new designs.
Only networking and some other functions were used on the integrated LASI chipset — due to time constraints a modified version
of the F-Class HP-PB Personality boards
was used for SCSI, serial MUX and parallel.
| System | Model number | Introduced | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| E25 | HP 9000/806 | 1994 | $6,000 |
| E35 | HP 9000/816 | 1994 | |
| E45 | HP 9000/826 | 1994 | $11,320 |
| E55 | HP 9000/856 | 1995? |
HP 9000 E-Class were positioned by HP in the 1994 Unix server market against IBM RS/6000 POWER-based 220, 230 and 250 and the Sun SPARCclassic and SPARCstation 10.
System architecture
Processors
| Model | CPU | Speed | L1 Cache |
|---|---|---|---|
| E25 | PA-7100LC | 48 MHz | 1 KB on-chip and 64 KB off-chip |
| E35 | PA-7100LC | 64 MHz | 1 KB on-chip and 256 KB off-chip |
| E45 | PA-7100LC | 80 MHz | 1 KB on-chip and 256 KB off-chip |
| E55 | PA-7100LC | 96 MHz | 1 KB on-chip and 1024 KB off-chip |
Chipset
- LASI as central I/O chipset
- Wax EISA bridge
- HP-PB bus converter, 8 MHz HP-PB frequency
- HP ASICs for HP-PB, SCSI and MUX port
System buses
- Memory attaches directly to the PA-7100LC processors
- GSC as the main system bus (128 MB/s) that connects CPU, LAN, I/O and HP-PB
- HP-PB device and I/O bus (32 MB/s)
- Integrated I/O Card attaches to HP-PB with SCSI, serial and parallel
- SCSI-2 Fast-Narrow single-ended bus; main storage I/O
Memory
- 72-pin ECC SIMMs, 8-64 MB modules
- Eight slots
- 16 MB minimum, 512 MB maximum
Expansion slots
- Two slots for HP-PB cards
Storage
- One tray for two 3.5″ Fast-Narrow SE 50-pin SCSI hard drives
- One tray for three half-height 5.25″ Fast-Narrow SE 50-pin drives, externally accessible
External ports
- SCSI-2 50-pin single-ended
- Hsigh-pin-count MUX connector
- Ethernet RJ45
- Ethernet AUI 15-pin
- Parallel DB25
Operating systems
- HP-UX 10.20 for 800s servers, HP-UX 11.00 and HP-UX 11i v1 (unsupported)
- Linux: very limited hardware support (no SCSI and other)
- NetBSD: very limited hardware support (no SCSI, only serial and other)
As the E-Class used a proprietary (800 series) system design like the older F and G-Class Nova servers and few architecture documentation or specifications were released publically by HP, there has never been much support in alternative operating systems.
Benchmarks
| Model | SPEC92 int | SPEC92 fp |
|---|---|---|
| E25 | 45.0 | 66.7 |
| E35 | 65.6 | 98.5 |
| E45 | 82.1 | 122.9 |
| E55 | 108.0 | 163.4 |
Comparison to SPEC benchmark data from other contemporary Unix computers:
| Model | CPU | SPEC92 int | SPEC92 fp | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intel Alder | Intel Pentium Pro 150MHz | 276.3 | 220.0 | ||
| IBM RS/6000 43P | PowerPC 604 100 MHz | 128.0 | 120.2 | ||
| Sun SPARCstation 20 | Sun SuperSPARC II 75MHz | 125.8 | 121.2 | ||
| Siemens PCE-5S | Intel Pentium 100MHz | 96.2 | 81.2 | ||
| SGI Indy | MIPS R4400SC 75MHz | 88.1 | 96.6 | ||
| DEC AlphaStation 200 | DEC Alpha 21064 100MHz | 74.6 | 95.2 | ||
| Sun SPARCstation 10 | Sun SuperSPARC 40MHz | 50.2 | 60.2 | ||
| 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 | |||
| Motorola 8000 | Motorola 88100 33MHz | 27.7 | 18.8 |
References
- Development of a Low-Cost, High-Performance, Multiuser Business Server System (PDF, HP Journal 4/95, archive.org)
- HP 9000 E-Class Servers Product Brief (.pdf) Hewlett-Packard Company (1993: Hewlett-Packard)
- HP 9000 New product Summary guide, technical sales document, first part is on 712, Hewlett Packard: 1993, 1000bit.it archive
Pictures
- E35: complete, CPU, CPU rear, I/O board, rear (pictures © Copyright ESIEE; with permission)
- E55: front, rear, CPU top, CPU bottom, I/O top, I/O bottom, backplane, PSU rear, chassis front, chassis rear (pictures © Copyright Ralf Folkerts; with permission)
