HP’s e3000 Platform Planning Manager Dave Snow announced that a new system based on the company’s A-Class HP 9000 servers will be introduced next year, offering a refresh on the low end of the 3000 line.

Snow’s talk referred to the system as a “Next Generation” low end HP 3000, one of three price points for computers using the latest PA-RISC processors and PCI IO subsystems.

The A-Class e3000s will be “priced in the region of the 9x8s, but will have higher performance,” Snow said. Performance will range from 1.7 at the low end of A-Class to greater than 5, measured in HP 3000 performance units where a Series 918 is a 1.

The A-Class systems can accept PA-8600 and PA-8700 systems, and will ship “perhaps in the third quarter” with PA-8500 processors. Maximum memory will be 8Gb. HP claims its current 918 systems only support about a 512Mb. The A-Class comes with 100-Base-T bandwidth included, and two or four IO slots. “One of its significant limiters will be IO capacity,” Snow said.

The A-Class form factor starts to approach the portability that some 3000 customers have hoped for, with each unit standing less than 4 inches (9 cm) high. “It becomes almost something you could stick under a terminal, and it almost looks like a PC,” Snow said. “People have been asking for it for 15 years.”

The A-Class boxes will require MPE/iX 7.0, just as the forthcoming N Class systems will. In time, it will support multiple processors. “This will become an attractive platform a year from now,” Snow said. “ I hope in the Chicago [HP World show next August] to talk about this already shipping, or shortly to be shipping.”

HP won’t be using the L-Class technology from its 9000 line for future e3000s. It expects to have lower-frequency N-Class systems to fill the L Class pricing space.

N-Class details

While the A-Class system will use the PA-8500 chips HP has been discussing for its next generation, the N-Class systems at the midrange and high end of the Next Generation will get even faster than last reported. They’ll use PA-8600 chips at release.

Snow said that the 3000 division has a policy of using the latest released version of the PA-RISC processors. The arrival of the N-Class systems has little to do with processor availability, he explained. It’s all about the time needed to rework the 3000’s IO subsystems. The A-Class e3000s will leverage the engineering that the 3000 labs are completing this fall for the N-Class.

But the arrival of N-Class systems “doesn’t mean we’re going to force people to move to these.” Snow said HP would continue to sell the 9x9 systems after the N-Class 3000s ship early next year. Support for the 9x9s will continue for five years after the N-Class introduction.

He also said that CSY “isn’t going to lead in terms of moving to IA-64. We don’t need to. We’ve got good-performing chips that provide us with the 30 percent per year performance increase — maybe even exceeding that — for several years to come.” N-Class boxes will debut which have 30 percent greater performance than the current top end of the line, the 12-way Series 997 systems. HP relative performance unit ratings will be in the mid-60s for the N-Class top-end, compared to the low 50s for the current Series 997s. Systems with slower clock speeds of the PA-8600 will serve as the midrange of the next generation 3000 line. The 8600 chips will be released in frequencies of 220, 330, 440, and 550 MHz.

Initial shipments of the N-Class will have only 4-way processing, but will still outperform a 12-way Series 997. “That gives you a feel for the power of the server and the infrastructure changes that we’ve built into this box,” he said. Ultra-SCSI comes with the platform, as well as 12 IO slots, each with a 400Mb per second transfer rate. The current capacity on 3000 slots is between 20 to 30Mb per second.

The N-Class ships with two integrated disk drives, at a minimum of 36Gb each and 72Gb later in the year 2001. “LDEV 1 will still be 4Gb,” Snow said, to some laughter in the audience. “It’s a separate issue and it’s being worked upon.” HP will remove the requirement to purchase an integrated hard disk when it starts to sell the N-Class 3000s.

Gigabit LAN won’t be available at first release, but will appear in an add-on card available in early 2002. But the core MFIO card built in to the N-Class will have both 10 and 100-Base-T network bandwidth. On current HP 3000s, a separate card must be added for 100-Base-T. HP will continue to charge customers support fees for the 100-Base-T software on the 900 Series systems, but N-Class systems will have no such support charge. Native Fiber Channel support is now projected for 2002, Snow added.

IA-64 Update

IA-64 will require a new MPE/iX release, Snow said. He stated, without any conditions, that “PA-RISC and Classic applications will not have to be recompiled [for IA-64]. Some servers will be board upgradeable to IA-64. N-Class is planned to be; the A-Class is not planned to be.” Making the technology choices to support IA-64 would raise the price of the A-Class systems, Snow said.

MPE/iX support for IA-64 will begin beyond 2003, he said. “We think we have enough performance with PA-RISC to last us well into 2003,” he said, “so 2004 is the earliest you’ll see IA-64 from the MPE perspective.”

The arrival of the IA-64 boxes looks like it will signal a new set of binaries for applications. Developers and customers who run their own code “don’t have to worry about developing two binaries, one each for IA-64 and PA-RISC, and then recompile it for the highest performance on IA-64. That’s a few years away before you have to worry about that.”