SAIC Galaxy 1100

Quick Facts
Introduced 1994
Period Maturity (III)
Series Portable
CPU PA-7100LC 32-bit
60/80 MHz
Caches 64/256 KB L1
RAM 128 MB
Design LASI
Drives 1 SCSI
1 FD
Expansion 2 PCMCIA
(1 GIO
1 TSIO)
I/O Ethernet
SCSI
serial
parallel
VGA
2 PS/2
audio

SAIC Galaxy 1100 are portable PA-RISC workstations based on 32-bit HP 9000 712 workstations in a ruggedized case released in 1994. Galaxy 1100 portables are very rare computers, originally built by SAIC in the 1990s for military and intelligence applications.

SAIC Galaxy
© SAIC

HP was part of the US Navy TAC-4 program in the 1990s in which HP supplied PA-RISC workstations to the Navy for measurement and control. For environments where standard workstations were not robust enough, HP contracted SAIC to produce a ruggedized MIL-SPEC portable workstation for the Navy: the SAIC Galaxy 1100 based on HP 9000 712.

As these systems were produced under a military contract and sometimes used in classified environment only few became available to civilian world. Only two other portable PA-RISC computers were sold – the RDI PrecisionBook, based on HP Visualize C132L, and the Japanese Hitachi 3050RX 100C laptop; the SAIC Galaxy was not directly sold outside of military contracts and only later became available publically through resellers.

A long article on SAIC Galaxy 1100 and their VUE environment by Cameron Kaiser from 2023 expands on the background and historic usage of Galaxy. There were a few other RISC Laptops in the 1990s, with a wide variety of processor architectures such as SPARC, PowerPC and even Alpha.

System

Processors

System CPU Speed L1 Cache
Galaxy 1000 PA-7100LC 60 MHz 1 KB on-chip and 64 KB off-chip
Galaxy 1100 PA-7100LC 80 MHz 1 KB on-chip and 256 KB off-chip

Chipset

SAIC used the HP 9000 712 workstation design, based on the integrated HP LASI chipset, a custom and highly integrated HP design, which combines many functions and I/O on a single chip. Together with the on-CPU memory controller (MIOC), this resulted in a very integrated system architecture.

HP LASI was primarily designed for cost-reduction while still providing all required I/O functions in a single chip. It was used as the main system controller in most PA-7100LC and PA-7300LC systems. SAIC added the PCMCIA controller and drivers.

Display

Human Input

System buses

Expansion

Memory

Expansion cards

SAIC developed several specialized I/O devices for the Galaxy that attached to GIO/TSIO expansion slots. Industry-standard PCMCIA slots were available as well through a SAIC-specific extension board.

Storage

Ports

Operating systems

Since Galaxy 1100 are technically normal PA-RISC workstations they support standard PA-RISC operating systems and software.

Performance

Based on old SPEC92 and SPEC95 archives
System CPU SPEC92
int		 SPEC92
fp		 SPEC95
int		 SPEC95
fp
Galaxy 1000 HP PA-7100LC 60 MHz 67.0 85.3 2.08 2.66
Galaxy 1100 HP PA-7100LC 80 MHz 99 122 3.12 3.55

Computers with PA-7100LC processors were slightly faster than MIPS, Alpha, SPARC and Intel computers from the same time, but usually significantly faster in floating point, in SPEC benchmarks.

Based on old SPEC95 archives
System CPU SPEC92
int		 SPEC92
fp		 SPEC95
int		 SPEC95
fp
Sun SPARCstation 20 Sun SuperSPARC II 75MHz 125.8 121.2 3.11 3.10
Siemens PCE-5S Intel Pentium 100MHz 96.2 81.2 4.04 2.35
SGI Indy MIPS R4400SC 75MHz 88.1 96.6
IBM RS/6000 Notebook 860 PowerPC 603e 166MHz 3.94 2.71
DEC AlphaStation 200 DEC Alpha 21064 100MHz 74.6 95.2 1.48 2.79
Sun SPARCstation 10 Sun SuperSPARC 40MHz 50.2 60.2 1.13 1.38
Digital DECstation 5000 MIPS R4000 50MHz 43.2 42.1
Tadpole SPARCbook 3 Sun MicroSPARC 50MHz 26.4 21.0

Dimensions

Height Width Depth Weight
114mm 412mm 311mm 8kg

Documentation

Most documentation is only available at archive.org and other archives, with most official sources, articles and journals having disappeared in the 2010s.

up