HP L1000 and L2000 (rp5400/rp5450)

Quick Facts
Introduced	2000
Period	Maturity (III)
Series	Lettered/Integrity
CPU	1-2 (L1000) 1-4 (L2000) PA-8500 PA-8600 360-550 MHz
Caches	1.5 MB L1
RAM	8 GB (L1000) 16 GB (L2000)
Design	Astro
Drives	5 SCSI
Expansion	8 PCI (L1000) 12 PCI (L2000)
I/O	2 SCSI 2 serial Fast Ethernet Ethernet console

HP 9000 L-Class L1000 and L2000 are two or four-way multi-processor PA-RISC servers for rack-mounting, 7U in height. They are based on 64-bit processors and a rather conservative system architecture with an Astro/Elroy system design used in HP Visualize workstations like B2000, C3000 and C3600.

L-Class from 2000 was billed by HP as Smart, Simple, and Stress-free servers for Internet-Age Computing, i.e. dot-com boom e-commerce. They were slightly smaller solutions than the N4000 servers but still had a scalable architecture and functionality plus both Unparalleled Internet manageability and The Internet edge.

As with other HP 9000 servers of the late-1990s, L-Class were renamed to rp but stayed part of the HP 9000 series. Their L1500 and L3000 sucessors used a completely different system architecture. The L1000 and L2000 could be upgraded with a board-swap to Itanium 2-based rx5670 servers.

HP L1000 rp5400 were introduced in 2000 for $16,000
HP L2000 rp5450 were introduced in 2000 for $21,000

System architecture

Processors

The L1000/rp5400 systems support up to 2-way and the L2000/rp5450 up to 4-way SMP, with processors designated by the [-36, -44, -5X] suffix.. There two different system boards (A and B) in both systems, which supported different types of processors.

System	Suffix	CPU	Speed	L1 Cache
L1000 rp5400 A5576A	-36 -44	1-2 PA-8500 PA-RISC 64-bit 1-2 PA-8500 PA-RISC 64-bit	360 MHz 440 MHz	512/1024 KB on-chip 512/1024 KB on-chip
L1000 rp5400 A5576B	-36 -44 -5X	1-2 PA-8500 PA-RISC 64-bit 1-2 PA-8500 PA-RISC 64-bit 1-2 PA-8600 PA-RISC 64-bit	360 MHz 440 MHz 550 MHz	512/1024 KB on-chip 512/1024 KB on-chip 512/1024 KB on-chip
L2000 rp5400 A5191A	-36 -44	1-4 PA-8500 PA-RISC 64-bit 1-4 PA-8500 PA-RISC 64-bit	360 MHz 440 MHz	512/1024 KB on-chip 512/1024 KB on-chip
L2000 rp5400 A5191B	-36 -44 -5X	1-4 PA-8500 PA-RISC 64-bit 1-4 PA-8500 PA-RISC 64-bit 1-4 PA-8600 PA-RISC 64-bit	360 MHz 440 MHz 550 MHz	512/1024 KB on-chip 512/1024 KB on-chip 512/1024 KB on-chip

Upgrading between processors models required sometimes replacing other parts besides the processor, like the mainboard or power supply.

Chipset

Astro memory/Runway controller, connects the memory, CPU bus and I/O
Eight Elroy PCI bridges
Two HP Diva Serial [GSP] Multiport UARTs
DEC 21142/43 Fast Ethernet controller (Tulip)
Two Symbios Logic 53C875 16-bit Ultra-Wide SCSI-2 controllers
Symbios Logic 53C896 Ultra2-Wide SCSI-3 controller

System buses

Runway CPU bus, 82.5 MHz with 1.36 GB/s bandwidth for up to four CPUs
Memory bus, 1.36 GB/s
Eight I/O data channels, each 133 MHz 256 MB/s — 2.1 GB/s aggregate
Two PCI-64/33 I/O buses
Six PCI-64/66 I/O buses
SCSI-2 Ultra-Narrow single-ended bus
Two SCSI-3 Ultra2-Wide LVD main storage I/O buses

Memory

ECC SDRAM DIMMs
Take 256 MB/512 MB modules
16 slots (8 of these slots are disabled on L1000s, namely slots 4a/b, 5a/b, 6a/b and 7a/b)
256 MB (1×256) minimum, L1000: 8 GB (8×1 GB) maximum; L2000: 16 GB (16×1 GB) maximum.

Expansion slots

Six PCI 64-bit/33 MHz slots on two independent buses:
- pci0: Slots 1 and 2 are reserved for the Core I/O cards
- pci1: Slots 3, 4, 5 and 6
- All of the above slots are not hot-plug capable
Six PCI 64-bit/66 MHz slots, each on an independent bus. These are hot-plug capable.
On L1000s only the slots 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 are usable!
Slot layout (from bottom to top):
1. PCI-64/33, pci0, reserved for core I/O
2. PCI-64/33, pci0, reserved for core I/O
3. PCI-64/33, pci1
4. PCI-64/33, pci1
5. PCI-64/33, pci1
6. PCI-64/33, pci1
7. PCI-64/66, pci2, hot-pluggable
8. PCI-64/66, pci3, hot-pluggable
9. PCI-64/66, pci4, hot-pluggable
10. PCI-64/66, pci5, hot-pluggable
11. PCI-64/66, pci6, hot-pluggable
12. PCI-64/66, pci7, hot-pluggable

Storage

Four trays for each one 3.5″ Ultra2-Wide LVD SCSI hard drive with 80-pin SCA connector
One tray for a half-heigth 5.25″ 50-pin Ultra-Narrow SE SCSI drive, external accessible

External ports

SCSI-2 50-pin Ultra-Narrow single-ended
68-pin VHDI SCSI-3 Ultra2-Wide LVD
Serial RS232C DB9
Fast Ethernet RJ45
Ethernet RJ45 Web Console

Operating systems

HP-UX: 64-bit 11.00, 11i v1 and 11i v2
PA-RISC Linux: works.

Benchmarks

System	SPEC95 int	SPEC95 fp	SPEC2000 int	SPEC2000 fp
L2000-44	33.70	47.20	?	?

Dimensions

System	Height	Width	Depth	Weight
	368mm	482mm	774mm	68kg
Rack-mounted	7U	482mm	774mm	68kg

Documentation

rp5400 User Guide (URL gone)
L-Class Home archive.org, Hewlett-Packard Company (2000: mirror accessed January 2024)

Pictures

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