HP zx2000 Itanium Workstations

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 4 SCSI/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 technically similar to C8000 PA-RISC workstations and based around the same HP zx1 chipset. HP zx2000 workstations are built in a sleek tower case, optionally available as rack-mount.

The similar HP zx6000 workstations were closely based on HP zx2000 but dual-processor capable, compared to the uni-processor zx2000.

Shortly after releasing the zx2000, HP dropped Itanium workstations altogether from its portfolio with no modern HP-UX Unix workstations available anymore, after two decades. HP discontinued the Itanium Workstation family as of September 2004, all remaining HP-UX and Itanium offerings were Integrity rx servers.

HP zx2000 workstations were offered with HP-UX and Linux as more affordable option for Unix technical design and visualization. They were significantly cheaper than zx6000 and earlier PA-RISC workstations.

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System

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.

System buses

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Expansion

Memory

Expansion cards

Storage

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Ports

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Operating systems

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Pictures

HP zx2000
HP zx2000, © Copyright Dennis Grevenstein

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Dimensions

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

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Performance

HP zx2000 workstations, especially with fast Itanium 2 processors were some of the fastest HP-UX workstations ever sold by. They were usually faster than higher-clocked MIPS, Alpha, UltraSPARC and Intel computers from the same time in SPEC benchmarks.

Compared to the competition at the time, Itanium computers were exceptionally strong in floating-point use cases, beating other CPUs in FP with more than twice the clock. Integer and general workloads were much weaker in Itanium, only barely beating PA-RISC, but a Madison 1.5 GHz much higher rater Intel and AMD processors.

PA-RISC SPEC scores of HP 9000 computers
System Processor SPEC2000
int / fp		 SPEC2000
rate int/fp
zx2000 McKinley 900 MHz 668 1086 12.6
Based on old SPEC2000 archives
System Processor SPEC2000
int / 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
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 i2000 Itanium 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.

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