HP i2000 Itanium Workstation

Quick Facts
Introduced 2001
Period Decline (IV)
Series Itanium
CPU 1-2 64-bit
Itanium Merced
733-800 MHz
Caches 32 KB L1
96 KB L2
2-4.0 MB L3
RAM 16 GB
Design 82460GX
Drives 6-8 drives
Expansion 5 PCI 64/66
2 PCI 64/33
1 AGP Pro 110
I/O Fast Ethernet
4 USB
serial
2 PS/2

HP i2000 was HP’s first Itanium workstation with first generation Merced Itanium processor, released in 2001 as proof-of-concept to deliver first Itanium VLIW computers, based on an early Intel 82460GX reference design, rebranded and sold by other vendors.

Itanium had been long in development as joint HP-Intel project that promised a better CPU future based on a new VLIW/EPIC processor architecture for HP-UX, Windows and Linux, from workstations to servers and supercomputers.

HP i2000
© Hewlett Packard 2001

HP i2000 was the first Itanium workstation to actually leave the gates of HP, released in parallel to almost the last PA-RISC workstations, C3650 and C3750, followed a few years later by c8000 and Itanium zx2000.

As HP put it in 2001, when HP invited Intel into our lab, we showed them the architecture that will become the pervasive 64-bit architecture of the 21st century. They shared our vision and together we invented the Itanium processor family specification. The i2000 was the first, unhappy materialization of that vision.

HP i2000 had an interesting set of possible operating systems: HP-UX Unix, Linux, OpenVMS on Itanium, Windows XP and 2000. OpenVMS was actually ported on i2000, with first boot in 2003. HP i2000 was commercially unsuccessful and very unpopular.

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System

Processors

Itanium CPUs have complex cache arrangements
System CPU Speed L1 and L2 cache L3 cache
HP i2000 1 Itanium Merced VLIW 64-bit 733 MHz 16/16 KB and 96 KB on-die 2.0-4.0 MB off-chip
HP i2000 1-2 Itanium Merced VLIW 64-bit 800 MHz 16/16 KB and 96 KB on-die 2.0-4.0 MB off-chip

Chipset

HP i2000 Itanium workstations had certain limitations due to chipset and operating system bugs and supported only first generation IA64 processors. The workstations were used mostly for Itanium software and hardware development.

System buses

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Expansion

Memory

Expansion cards

Storage

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Ports

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Operating systems

OpenVMS for Integrity (Itanium) was apparently developed on HP i2000, official time of the first boot of OpenVMS on Integrity was January 31, 2003 at 3:31 PM EST on an HP i2000 (Itanium1) system.

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Performance

HP i2000 with first generation Itanium (Merced) CPU were not very fast workstations. They were beaten by most contemporary 2000s workstations in work loads other than floating point, as HP said the i2000 will outperform most, if not all, current architectures in floating point performance in the SPECfp benchmark, which was true.

HP claimed real-world relevant Integer performance in applications such as encryption/decryption operations for secure web serving is excellent, however Itanium was even beaten in integer by the inhouse PA-RISC competition it was meant to replace. HP and Intel were very hesitant in releasing Merced benchmark results.

HP computers based on second generation Itanium like HP zx6000 were much quicker.

PA-RISC SPEC scores of HP 9000 computers
* - HP-UX
^ - Windows XP
System Processor SPEC2000
int / fp		 SPEC2000
rate int/fp
i2000 Itanium Merced 733 MHz 2 MB
335*		 623^
577*		     7.2^
i2000 Itanium Merced 800 MHz 2 MB
2 Itanium Merced 800 MHz 2 MB		 365* 610*
658^		 7.6^
13.2^
i2000 Itanium Merced 800 MHz 4 MB
Based on old SPEC2000 archives
System Processor SPEC2000
int / fp
HP c8000 PA-8800 1.0 GHz 1001
HP zx6000 McKinley 1.0 GHz 807 1422
HP AlphaServer ES80 Alpha 21364 1GHz 689 975
HP Visualize C3750 PA-8700+ 875 MHz 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 Visualize P750C Pentium III 750MHz 325 219
AlphaServer ES40 Alpha 21264 500MHz 311 382
HP Visualize C3000 PA-8500 400MHz 313 321
HP Visualize P500 Intel Pentium III 500MHz 231 191

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Dimensions

Height Width Depth Weight
457mm 254mm 645mm 38kg

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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.

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