SAIC Talon

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

SAIC Talon are portable PA-RISC workstations based on HP 9000 712 workstations in a ruggedized case released in 1994. Talon portables are almost unknown today, originally built by SAIC in the 1990s for military and intelligence applications as part of the US Navy TAC-4 program.

SAIC Talon
Talon © SAIC 1996

HP supplied the US Navy in the 1990s in the TAC-4 program with PA-RISC workstations. For severe environments, HP contracted SAIC to produce ruggedized MIL-SPEC workstations for the Navy: the SAIC Talon and Galaxy.

Both Talon and Galaxy were based on HP 9000 712 workstation design, with Talon seemingly even more ruggedized than Galaxy, painted in Forest green, color 24052 per FED-STD-595. Talon and Galaxy were produced under military contract and used in classified environments, so only few became available to civilian world. There is scant information available on SAIC Talon.

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
Talon PA-7100LC 60 MHz 1 KB on-chip and 64 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, VME and EISA controller and drivers.

Display

Human Input

System buses

Expansion

Memory

Expansion cards

SAIC provided a 14.4k modem for the PCMCIA slot, which are labelled optional in documentation. It is unclear what happened to the standard GSIO/TSIO slots on stock 712 mainboards. It is also unclear how the EISA expansion was added to the system, and how the VME connects to it.

Storage

Ports

Operating systems

Talons are possibly normal PA-RISC workstations and should support standard PA-RISC operating systems and software.

Pictures

SAIC Talon
Talon © SAIC 1996

Dimensions

Height Width Depth Weight
190mm 508mm 406mm 18kg

Environmental requirements

Performance

PA-RISC SPEC scores of HP 9000 computers
System CPU SPEC92
int		 SPEC92
fp		 SPEC95
int		 SPEC95
fp
Talon HP PA-7100LC 60 MHz 67.0 85.3 2.08 2.66

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.

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

Documentation

Most 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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