HP zx2000

Quick Facts
Introduced	2002
Period	Decline (IV)
Series	Itanium
CPU	1 Itanium 2 900 MHz-1.5 GHz
Caches	32 KB L1 256 KB L2 1.5-4.0 MB L3
RAM	8 GB
Design	zx1
Drives	0-4 SCSI/ 0-4 IDE
Expansion	1 PCI-X 64/133 4 PCI-x 64/66 1 AGP 4x
I/O	Gigabit Ethernet SCSI 4 USB 2 serial MGMT

HP zx2000 were Itanium workstations from HP, released in the early 2000s. They are close to PA-RISC C8000 workstations and build around the same HP zx1 chipset. zx2000 workstations are built in a sleek tower case, also available as rack-mount.

Shortly after releasing the zx2000, HP dropped Itanium workstations altogether from its portfolio and soon had no modern HP-UX Unix workstations anymore. All remaining HP-UX and Itanium offerings were IA64 server systems, the Integrity rx.

HP zx6000 Itanium workstations were based on HP zx2000 but were dual-processor capable.

HP zx2000 were introduced in 2002
- 900 MHz, SCSI, Radeon 7000, Linux sold for $5,554
- 900 MHz, IDE, Radeon 7000, HP-UX MTOE sold for $5,865
- 900 MHz, SCSI, Fire GL4, HP-UX MTOE sold for $8,340

Architecture

Processors

All caches are on-die (L1, L2 and L3).
System	CPU	Speed	L1 and L2 cache	L3 cache
HP zx2000	Itanium 2 McKinley VLIW 64-bit	900 MHz	16/16 KB + 256 KB	1.5 MB
HP zx2000	Itanium 2 Madison VLIW 64-bit	1.4 GHz	16/16 KB + 256 KB	1.5 MB
HP zx2000	Itanium 2 Madison VLIW 64-bit	1.4 GHz	16/16 KB + 256 KB	1.5 MB
HP zx2000	Itanium 2 Madison VLIW 64-bit	1.5 GHz	16/16 KB + 256 KB	1.5 MB
HP zx2000	Itanium 2 Deerfield VLIW 64-bit	1.0 GHz	16/16 KB + 256 KB	1.5 MB

Chipset

HP zx2000 Itanium workstations are based on an HP zx1 chipset with two main components — MIO memory and I/O controller (HP Pluto) and IOA I/O adapters (HP Mercury), as used in PA-RISC c8000 and Itanium workstations like zx6000 as well.

HP zx1 chipset, on original HP Itanium design based on two main components: central memory and I/O controller (MIO), and I/O adapters (IOAs).
HP Pluto, zx1 MIO, the chipset controller connects the processor bus, two memory buses and seven I/O channels. Contains memory and cache controllers.
Six HP Mercury, zx1 IOAs, connect PCI-X slots and I/O devices to the zx1 MIO on six I/O channels (3.0 GB/s)
Gigabit Ethernet, Intel 82540
Two-channel Ultra160 SCSI controller (optional)
Ultra ATA-100 IDE controller, PCI649
Graphics possibly through separate AGP boards:
- Optional ATI FireGL4 (HP-UX)
- Optional ATI FireGL X1 (HP-UX)
- Optional ATI FireGL Z1 (HP-UX)
- Optional nVIDIA Quadro4 900 XGL (Linux)
- Optional nVIDIA Quadro4 980 XGL (Linux)
- Optional nVIDIA Quadro2 EX (Linux)
- Optional ATI Radeon 7000 AGP (HP-UX and Linux)
- Other cards might or might not work
PDH controller
Serial controller, DUART 16550A-compatible
FPGA controller for ACPI (2.0) and LPC
Baseboard management controller, BMC — IPMI interface

System buses

Itanium 2/zx1 processor bus 6.4 GB/s
zx1 memory bus, 200 MHz, 4.25 GB/s
Six zx1 I/O channels/buses, aggregate 3.0 GB/s I/O bandwidth
1. AGP 4x graphics bus on two channels: 1.0 GB/s
2. PCI-X 64/133 I/O slot on two channels: 1.0 GB/s
3. Four PCI-X 64/66 I/O slots on one channel: 0.5 GB/s
4. Gigabit Ethernet, IDE, USB and audio controllers on PCI 32/33 on one channel: 0.5 GB/s
AGP 4x graphics bus on two I/O channels, 1.0 GB/s aggregate
PCI-X 64/133 I/O bus on two I/O channels, 1.0 GB/s aggregate
PCI-X 64/66 I/O bus on one I/O channel, 0.5 GB/s aggregate
PCI 32/33 I/O bus for onboard devices on one I/O channel, 0.5 GB/s aggregate
SCSI-3 Ultra160 (LVD) storage I/O bus (if optional controller is installed)
UltraATA-100 IDE storage I/O bus

Expansion

Memory

PC2100 registered ECC DDR266 SDRAM DIMMs
Takes up to 2 GB modules
Four slots
512 MB minimum (2×256 MB)
8 GB maximum (4×2 GB)
4.25 GB/s memory bandwidth

I/O slots

One PCI-X 64-bit/133 MHz slot, full-length
Three PCI-X 64-bit/66 MHz slots, full-length
One PCI-X 64-bit/66 MHz slot, half-length
All PCI slots are 3.3 V
One AGP Pro 4x 32-bit slot, 1.5 V

Storage

Up to two internal 3.5″ bays for either Ultra ATA-100 IDE or Ultra160 SCSI hard drives
Two half-heigth 5.25″ bays for externally accessible Ultra ATA-100 IDE or SCSI (LVD or SE) drives (DVD/CD)

I/O ports

TP/RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet
Four USB 2.0 ports (two in front, two in rear)
Two serial RS232C DB9
Four phone jacks (microphone, line-in and line-out) on 16-bit audio card
Optional IEEE-1394 Firewire ports

Operating systems

HP-UX for Itanium 11i v1.6 and 11i v2
Linux for Itanium
FreeBSD/ia64
OpenVMS (officially unsupported on this platform)
Windows XP 64-Bit Edition Version 2003
Windows Server 2008 Itanium-based Editions
Windows Server 2003 Itanium-based Editions

Pictures

HP zx2000, © Copyright Dennis Grevenstein

Dimensions

System	Height	Width	Depth	Weight
Tower	502mm	268mm	512mm	25kg
Rack-mounted	4U	482mm	510mm	20kg

Benchmarks

System	Processor	SPEC2000 int	SPEC2000 fp	SPEC2000 rate int	SPEC2000 rate fp
zx2000	McKinley 900 MHz	668	1086		12.6

Comparison to SPEC benchmark data from other contemporary Unix workstations:

Based on old SPEC2000 archives
System	Processor	SPEC2000 int	SPEC2000 fp
Sun Ultra 40	AMD Opteron 256 3.0GHz	1957
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 c8000	PA-8800 1.0 GHz	1001 (est.)
HP AlphaServer ES80	Alpha 21364 1GHz	689	975
HP Visualize C3750	PA-RISC 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	Itanium Merced 800MHz 4MB	365	610

Documentation

HP Workstation zx2000 - Technical Reference Guide, 5969-3154, HP: April 2003 archive.org
HP workstation zx2000 - data sheet, 5981-1463EN, HP: July 2002 (URL gone)

↑ up