PA-RISC information - since 1999

HP zx6000

Quick Facts
Introduced 2002
Period Decline (IV)
Series Itanium
CPU 1-2 Itanium 2
900 MHz-1.5 GHz
Caches 32 KB L1
256 KB L2
1.5-6.0 MB L3
RAM 24 GB
Design zx1
Drives 3 SCSI
1 IDE
Expansion 3 PCI-X 64/133
1 AGP 4x
I/O Gigabit Ethernet
Fast Ethernet
SCSI
4 USB
2 serial
MGMT

HP zx6000 are dual-processor Itanium workstations from HP, released in 2002. The zx6000 were based technically on the zx2000 workstation with an HP zx1 Itanium system design, also used in a few PA-RISC servers and workstations. HP zx6000 have higher I/O and memory bandwidth and three times as much memory as HP zx2000 workstations and are SMP-capable for up to two processors.

HP zx6000
zx6000 © Thomas Schanz 2013

The zx6000 were designed for rack-mounting (2U) but with the optional tower kit could be converted to a sleek, loud standalone unit. Rack-mounted rx2600 servers are closely related.

HP zx6000 Itanium workstations with fast processor options were probably the fastest HP-UX workstations ever released by HP, even faster than the two years younger final HP c8000 PA-RISC workstation. Itanium workstations were discontinued in September 2004 by HP after releasing zx2000 and zx6000 and technical Unix workstations were discontinued altogether two years later.

HP zx6000 workstations were sold with HP-UX and Linux (more affordable) in a variety of configurations and graphics options, mainly for 3D and visualization.

Architecture

Processors

All caches are on-die (L1, L2 and L3).
System CPU Speed L1 and L2 cache L3 cache
HP zx6000 1-2 Itanium 2 McKinley VLIW 64-bit 900 MHz 16/16 KB + 256 KB 1.5 MB
HP zx6000 1-2 Itanium 2 McKinley VLIW 64-bit 1.0 GHz 16/16 KB + 256 KB 3.0 MB
HP zx6000 1-2 Itanium 2 Madison VLIW 64-bit 1.3 GHz 16/16 KB + 256 KB 3.0 MB
HP zx6000 1-2 Itanium 2 Madison VLIW 64-bit 1.5 GHz 16/16 KB + 256 KB 6.0 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 zx2000 as well.

System buses

Expansion

Memory

I/O slots

Storage

I/O ports

Operating systems

Pictures

HP zx6000 HP zx6000 HP zx6000 HP zx6000
HP zx6000, Thomas Schanz 2013, CC BY-SA 4.0

Dimensions

System Height Width Depth Weight
Tower 494mm 295mm 675mm 25kg
Rack-mounted 2U 483mm 679mm 22kg

Benchmarks

System Processor SPEC2000
int
SPEC2000
fp
SPEC2000
rate int
SPEC2000
rate fp
zx6000 McKinley 900 MHz 669 1139 7.8
2-CPU: 15.4
13.2
2-CPU: 23.9
zx6000 McKinley 1.0 GHz 807 1422 16.5
2-CPU: 30
zx6000 Madison 1.5 GHz 1315 2106 15.2
2-CPU: 30.4
24.4
2-CPU: 42.4

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
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
HP zx2000 McKinley 900 MHz 668 1086
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

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.

Documentation

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