PA-RISC information - since 1999

HP 9000 Series 800 Nova Servers

Quick Facts
Introduced 1991-1993
Period Growth (II)
Series 800 Series
CPU 1 or 1-2 32-bit
PA-7000
PA-7100
32-96 MHz
Caches 96 KB-4 MB L1
RAM 128 MB (F10)
192 MB (F20/F30)
384 MB (H20/H30/G30/I30)
768 MB (x50/x60/x70)
Design Viper
Drives many
Expansion 2 HP-PB (Fx0)
6 HP-PB (Gx0)
8 HP-PB (Hx0)
12 HP-PB (Ix0)
I/O SCSI
MUX
parallel

HP 9000 Nova F, G, H and I Class are HP 9000 800 PA-RISC servers from the early 1990s. They were based on 32-bit PA-7000 and PA-7100 processors and suceeded the 1980s early HP 9000 800 servers based on PA-RISC 1.0.

HP 9000 H50 Server
H50, © Hewlett Packard

Nova servers were designed by the HP Technical Server division with distinct architecture to PA-RISC workstations, sharing few devices and I/O systems. Chipset was similar with HP ASP and Viper, but I/O was on special HP-PB.

Billed as HP 9000 Midrange Business Servers, Nova servers were targeted for business applications and transactions in a compact deskside and rack­mountable case. They offered lots of expansion and were often used for I/O and storage-heavy workloads. Entry Nova servers were often shipped without FPU, as floating-point performance was often not required.

Nova servers were suceeded by E Class servers with PA-7100LC that shared F Class cases and some of the proprietary I/O design. Many Nova servers became available second-hand in the 2000s at bargain prices, since few follow-on use cases were possible for the cumbersome machines with limited software options but HP-UX.

© Hewlett Packard 1997

Some Nova servers could be upgraded to other configurations through a range of easy processor board and slot upgrades, as they had up to 10.3 x performance headroom in the same chassis. There were performance upgrades on the vertical axis and I/O slot upgrades on the horizontal axis.

Architecture

Processors

System CPU FPU Speed L1 Cache
HP 9000 F10 PA-7000 PA-RISC 32-bit optional 32 MHz 32/64 KB off-chip
HP 9000 F20, H20 PA-7000 PA-RISC 32-bit optional 48 MHz 64/64 KB off-chip
HP 9000 F30, G30, H30, I30 PA-7000 PA-RISC 32-bit optional 48 MHz 256/256 KB off-chip
HP 9000 G40, H40, I40 PA-7000 PA-RISC 32-bit optional 64 MHz 256/256 KB off-chip
HP 9000 G50, H50, I50 PA-7100 PA-RISC 32-bit integrated 96 MHz 256/256 KB off-chip
HP 9000 G60, H60, I60 PA-7100 PA-RISC 32-bit integrated 96 MHz 1024/1024 KB off-chip
HP 9000 G70, H70, I70 1-2 PA-7100 PA-RISC 32-bit integrated 96 MHz 2048/2048 KB off-chip

[F, G, H, I] letters indicate I/O expansion options and case, [10, 20, … 70] denote used processors and chipsets. G, H and I class shared the same case.

Picture of H20 (827) CPU Board (PA-7000) Thomas Schanz 2008

Chipset

The chipset is a variant of HP ASP with HP Viper memory controller, interfacing the processor to memory and HP-PB I/O bus. System I/O is implemented on so-called HP-PB Personality Boards with separate I/O devices and chips.

HP 9000 807-877 System Architecture: 

            _______ 
          _|  FPU  |_ 
         | |_______| |
  _____  |           |  _____
 |Cache|_|           |_|Cache|
 |__I__| |           | |__D__|
         |  _______  |
   32-bit|_|PA-7000|_|64-bit
           |__CPU__|
               ||
               ||PBus
               ||32-bit
           ____||____      ||||
          |Memory I/O| 72b |||| Memory
          |Controller|=====|||| ECC
          |___Viper__| PMB ||||
               ||          ||||
               ||VSC  
               ||32-bit
           ____||____
          |HP-PB Bus |
          |Controller|
          |__________|
               ||
               ||32-bit
               ||     32-bit
==============================
  |    |    |           ||||
Serial | Parallel    HP-PB Slots
       |
     SCSI

System buses

Expansion

Memory

I/O slots

Storage

I/O ports

Operating systems

The only operating system for these servers was HP-UX, with all of them supported in HP-UX 10.20 for 800s servers and 11.00. First supported release was HP-UX 8.02, official support was dropped in 11.11 (11i v1).

Benchmarks

Based on old SPEC92, Dhrystone and MIPS archives
System CPU SPEC92
int		 SPEC92
fp		 MIPS
HP 9000 F10 PA-7000 32 MHz 22.0 36.6 35
HP 9000 F20, H20 PA-7000 48 MHz 33.6 56.1 53
HP 9000 F30, G30/H30, I30 PA-7000 48 MHz 37.8 62.4 53
HP 9000 G40/H40, I40 PA-7000 64 MHz 65.2 91.3 70
HP 9000 G50/H50, I50 PA-7000 96 MHz 100.0 158.5 115
HP 9000 G60/H60, I60 PA-7000 96 MHz 108.8 195.3 115
HP 9000 G70/H70, I70 PA-7000 96 MHz 108.8 195.3 115

Comparison to SPEC benchmark data from other contemporary Unix computers:

Based on old SPEC92 archives
System CPU SPEC92
int		 SPEC92
fp
HP 9000 755/125 PA-7150 125 MHz 136.0 201.0
IBM RS/6000 43P PowerPC 604 100 MHz 128.0 120.2
Sun SPARCstation 20 Sun SuperSPARC II 75MHz 125.8 121.2
HP 9000 E55 PA-7100LC 96 MHz 108.0 163.4
Siemens PCE-5S Intel Pentium 100MHz 96.2 81.2
SGI Indigo2 MIPS R4400 150MHz 85.9 93.6
HP 9000 E45 PA-7100LC 80 MHz 82.1 122.9
DEC AlphaStation 200 DEC Alpha 21064 100MHz 74.6 95.2
HP 9000 712/60 PA-7100LC 60 MHz 67.0 85.3
Motorola 900 Motorola 88110 50MHz 54.0 62.2
Sun SPARCstation 10 Sun SuperSPARC 40MHz 50.2 60.2
HP 9000 E25 PA-7100LC 48 MHz 45.0 66.7
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
HP 9000 425e Motorola 68040 25MHz 12.2 9.3
Digital VAX4000 DEC KA46 22MHz 11.1 12.6

Documentation

Manuals

Product sheets

Other

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