HP C8000 Workstations

Quick Facts
Introduced 2004
Period Decline (IV)
Series Visualize
CPU 1-2 64-bit
PA-8800
PA-8900
800 MHz-1.1 GHz
Caches 3 MB L1
32-64 MB L2
RAM 32 GB
Design zx1
Drives 4 SCSI
2 IDE
3 SCSI/IDE
Expansion 3 PCI-X
3 PCI
1 AGP 8x
I/O Gigabit Ethernet
Fast Ethernet
SCSI
4 USB
2 serial
MGMT

HP c8000 is the last PA-RISC workstation produced by HP in 2004, with up to two dual-core PA-8800 Mako or PA-8900 64-bit processors. C8000 were the pinnacle of PA-RISC workstation design, released at a time when RISC workstations were on their way out.

HP C8000
C8000 © Hewlett Packard 2004

HP produced a long line of C-Class Unix workstations, starting with 32-bit HP Visualize C100 in 1995 to C3750 in 2001 and finally c8000 in 2004, when Windows workstations with powerful PC graphics already took their place in CAD/CAM and 3D.

With an array of system and I/O options, the core of c8000 workstations is the HP zx1 Itanium chipset, designed for HP Itanium workstations and servers. c8000 are built in a sleek, silent tower casing and also available as a rack-mount option.

HP c8000 were sold at the same time as Itanium workstations in the early 2000s, when HP offered Itanium zx2000 and zx6000 workstations with HP-UX Unix but also Windows 2000 and OpenVMS IA64.

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System

Processors

System CPU Speed Cache
C8000 1-2 PA-8800 PA-RISC 64-bit
dual-core		 900 MHz-1.0 GHz 1.5/1.5 MB on-chip
32 MB off-chip L2
C8000 1-2 PA-8900 PA-RISC 64-bit
dual-core		 900 MHz-1.1 GHz 1.5/1.5 MB on-chip
64 MB off-chip L2

Chipset

HP c8000 workstations are based on an HP zx1 Itanium chipset with two main components — MIO memory and I/O controller (HP Pluto) and IOA I/O adapters (HP Mercury), as used in HP Itanium workstations like zx2000 as well.

System buses

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Expansion

Memory

Expansion cards

All PCI slots are 3.3 V

  1. PCI-32/33, short PCI cards
  2. PCI-32/33, short PCI cards
  3. AGP-8X Pro, 110W
  4. PCI-64/33, short and full-length cards
  5. PCI-64/66, short and full-length cards
  6. PCI-64/66, short and full-length cards
  7. PCI-64/133, short and full-length cards

Storage

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Ports

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Operating systems

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Pictures

HP C8000 HP C8000 HP C8000
HP c8000 © HP 2004
HP C8000 HP C8000 HP C8000 HP C8000
HP c8000, Thomas Schanz 2013-2018, CC BY-SA 4.0

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Dimensions

System Height Width Depth Weight
Tower 490mm 287mm 572mm 22.5kg
Rack-mounted 5U 424mm 572mm 21.9kg

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Performance

HP c8000 workstations with PA-8800/PA-8900 processors were very fast PA-RISC computers. Benchmark results were never officially published, probably not to interfere with Itanium. Compared to other RISC and Unix platforms, PA-RISC was a fast architecture with PA-8800/PA-8900 processors very fast early 2000s 64-bit RISC processors.

PA-RISC SPEC scores of HP 9000 computers
System Processor SPEC2000
int/fp
HP c8000 PA-8800 1.0 GHz 1001 (est.)
Based on old SPEC2000 archives
System Processor SPEC2000
int/fp
AMD Opteron 250 2.4GHz 1619 1652
HP zx6000 Madison 1.5 GHz 1315 2106
Intel Pentium 4 520 2.8GHz 1290
HP ProLiant BL40p Intel Xeon 2.8GHz 1249 1081
AMD Athlon XP 2.2GHz 1080 873
HP zx6000 McKinley 1.0 GHz 807 1422
HP AlphaServer ES80 Alpha 21364 1GHz 689 975
HP Visualize C3750 PA-8700+ 875 MHz 2.2MB 678 674
IBM POWER 275 IBM POWER4+ 1GHz 617 862
Sun Fire 280R UltraSPARC III Cu 1GHz 511 688
DELL Power Edge 4400 Pentium III Xeon 1 GHz 437 302
IBM RS/6000 M80 IBM RS64 IV 750MHz 409 359
HP i2000 Merced 800MHz 365 610

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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.

ROM update

There is a firmware update available:

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