HP Integrity rx1600 and rx1620 Servers

Quick Facts
Introduced 2004
Period Decline (IV)
Series Integrity rx
CPU 1-2 64-bit
Itanium 2
1.0-1.6 GHz
Caches 32 KB L1
256 KB
1.5-3 MB L3
RAM 16 GB
Design zx1
Drives 2 SCSI
1 IDE
Expansion 4 PCI-X 64/133
I/O Gigabit Ethernet
Fast Ethernet
VGA
SCSI
4 USB
2 serial
MGMT

HP Integrity rx1600 and rx1620 are second generation Itanium rack-mountable servers from 2004 with up to two IA64 processors. Integrity rx1600 supported Itanium 2 Deerfield processors, later rx1620 up to two Itanium 2 Fanwood processors. Both types of CPUs were specified and marketed as low-voltage.

Integrity rx1600 series were small, 1U rack-mountable servers for mid-2000s Internet services and applications. They are based on a HP chipset design, HP zx1, which was shared with the last PA-RISC computers designed by HP.

System

Processors

All caches are on-die (L1, L2 and L3).
CPU Speed L1 Cache L2 Cache L3 Cache
rx1600 and rx1600-2
1-2 Itanium 2 Deerfield 1.0 GHz 16/16 KB 256 KB 1.5 MB
rx1620
1-2 Itanium 2 Fanwood 1.3 GHz 16/16 KB 256 KB 3.0 MB
1-2 Itanium 2 Fanwood 1.6 GHz 16/16 KB 256 KB 3.0 MB

Chipset

The systems are based on the HP zx1 chipset with two central components — Pluto and Mercury.

The remained consists of standard third-party I/O chipsets:

System buses

Expansion

Memory

Expansion cards

Storage

Ports

Operating systems

Performance

HP rx1600 servers were pretty performant small-size rack-servers for the early 2000s. With fast Itanium 2 processors, rx1600 had strong performance for computing and exceptionally strong floating point (FP) performance. Utilizing this fast architecture in real-world applications proved difficult though.

PA-RISC SPEC scores of HP 9000 computers
System Processor SPEC2000
rate int/fp		 SPEC2000
int/fp
rx1600 1 Deerfield 1.0 GHz
2 Deerfield 1.0 GHz		 9.71
19.1		 16.0
27.6		 837 1382
rx1620-2 1 Fanwood 1.3 GHz
2 Fanwood 1.3 GHz		 13.7
27.0		 25.7
42.7		 1178 2214
rx1620-2 1 Fanwood 1.6 GHz
2 Fanwood 1.6 GHz		 16.8
33.2		 31.2
50.4		 1452 2692

The main competition to HP Itanium rx servers were other, modern Unix servers with advanced RISC designs from Sun and IBM for business and computing use cases. Modern 64-bit x86 Xeon processors from Intel (and soon AMD) were a fierce competitor, though. Itanium 2 was a fast but expensive platform in the early 64-bit era of the early-2000s.

Based on SPEC2000 archives, SPECrate is SMP-sensitive
System Processor SPEC2000
rate int/fp		 SPEC2000
int/fp
IBM eServer p 655 4 IBM POWER4+ 1.7GHz 52.5 68.5 1103 1678
HP N4000-7X rp7400 8 PA-8700 750 MHz 46.7 32.1 551 524
HP rx2620-2 2 Itanium Madison? 1.6 GHz 35.5 51.5 1535 2675
DELL Power Edge 2650 2 Pentium Xeon 3.06GHz 27.4 20.8 1263 1195
Sun Fire V880 4 UltraSPARC III Cu 900MHz 23.9 30.6 507 697
SGI Origin 3200 4 MIPS R14000 600MHz 22.2 19.8 483 499
HP AlphaServer ES80 4 Alpha 21364 1GHz 34.6 58.9 689 975
IBM RS/6000 M80 4 IBM RS64 IV 750MHz 20.3 16.5 409 359
HP rx1600 2 IA64 Deerfield 1.0GHz 19.1 27.6 837 1382
HP AlphaServer ES40 4 Alpha 21264A 667MHz 18.4 19.7 413 500
IBM RS/6000 M80 4 IBM RS64 IV 750MHz 18.7 15.7 409 359
HP zx6000 2 McKinley 900 MHz 15.4 23.9 669 1139
Sun Fire 280R 2 UltraSPARC III Cu 1GHz 13.2 16.4 511 688
IBM POWER 265 2 IBM POWER-II 450GHz 7.30 8.19 318 401

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.

Manuals

Dimensions

Height Width Depth Weight
1U 482mm 680mm 22kg

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