HP Apollo Domain 10000

Quick Facts
Introduced 1988
Period Prelude
Series Early
CPU 1-4 32-bit
PRISM
18 MHz
Caches 192 KB
RAM 128 MB
Design Apollo
Drives up to four
Expansion 8 X-bus
6 VME
4 ISA
I/O depends

The Apollo Domain 10000 from Apollo Computer were marketed as personal supercomputer geared for complex workstation applications like electronic design automation (EDA) and mechanical computer-aided design and engineering (MCAD/MCAE). The Domain 10000 were designed and sold by Apollo Computer, a technical computing market leader in the 1980s, based on their own PRISM RISC architecture, before HP bought Apollo and integrated it into the HP 9000 lineup.

© Apollo 1980s

Apollo Computer was bought by HP at the end of the 1980s, taking over their product lineup with a plan on integrating technical computers (HP 9000 and Apollo) and software ecosystem. The Apollo workstation series was carried on for a few years under HP/Apollo branding; HP integrated Apollo as their workstation business unit with Apollo co-branding on the HP 9000 RISC workstations for a while but Apollo products and technology were phased out soon after and HP concentrated on its own PA-RISC computers and architecture.

Even though DN10000 and PRISM were soon phased out in its product lineup, HP communicaed an upgraded PRISM processor and Apollo hardware in 1989. HP envisaged double the computing power (from 22 to 44 MIPS), increased caches to 512/512 KB, increased memory to 512 MB using 4 Mb DRAMs and up to 18 GB of SCSI storage, called the DN10000TX upgrade in 1991 – which apparently never shipped.

System

Processors

System CPU Speed L1 Cache
Domain 10000 1-4 PRISM RISC 32-bit 18 MHz 128/64 KB on-chip

Chipset

Domain DN10000 and DSP10000 are based on Apollo PRISM, a 32-bit RISC architecture on a system backplane with central and expansion slots. Processors, memory and high-performance graphics are attached to the central X-bus. A central service processor (MC68020) also attaches to the X-bus and controls the VME and ISA I/O buses for devices and peripherals.

System buses

Expansion

Memory

Expansion cards

Storage

Ports

Operating systems

The only operating system for Apollo DN10000 is Domain/OS, Apollo's own operating system from the 1980s, originally called AEGIS. DN10000s were only supported by Domain/OS SR10, which allowed to select an environment on top of the OS – AEGIS and Unix (BSD or System V). There were no other operating systems available.

HP Apollo Domain operating system was discontinued by HP in 1997 and obsoleted in 2000 (by January 2001), the last versions were 10.3.5.15 and 10.4.1.2.

Performance

Based on Dhrystone and MIPS archives; * - scores unsure
System Processor SPEC89 MIPS
HP Apollo DN10000 Apollo PRISM 18 MHz 19 22
HP Apollo DN10000 4 Apollo PRISM 18 MHz 60-100
HP Apollo DN10000-TX Apollo PRISM2 36 MHz 44*

Comparison to SPEC benchmark data from other contemporary Unix computers:

Based on Dhrystone archives
System Processor SPEC89 MIPS
HP 9000 715 PA-7100 100 MHz 88
Siemens PCE-5S Intel Pentium 100MHz 79
HP 9000 730 PA-7000 66 MHz 78 69
HP 9000 705 PA-7000 35 MHz 34.6 36
Intel 486 PC i486DX2 66 MHz 25 31
Sun SPARCstation 2 SPARC 40MHz 25 28
DECstation 5000/200 MIPS R3000 25MHz 23 22
HP 9000 425e Motorola M68040 25MHz 10.3 18
DECstation 3100 MIPS R2000 16MHz 11.8 15
HP 9000 834 NS-1 PA-RISC 30 MHz 9.5 14
Intel i386 33MHz 4.3 8
IBM PC 6150 IBM ROMP 6MHz 2
HP 9000 320 Motorola M68020 15MHz 2
HP 9000 500 FOCUS 18 MHz ~1
DEC VAX 11/780 KA780 3.4MHz 1.0 0.9

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.

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