A-Class speed boost: For sale?

Clocked-down systems
might be in line for performance improvement

A poorly-kept secret might lead to richer performance in the HP 3000’s future, even though the vendor is done releasing faster, newer models of the server. Improved processor speeds lie locked inside the low-end A-Class models of the computer’s newest generation. Even some newer N-Class computers have room to run faster.

HP officials were mum about the clock slowdown in the A-Class and N-Class HP 3000 models during most of the first year of the brief sales span of the systems. The systems will only be sold for about two and a half years in total by HP: first shipped in the spring, 2001, and going off HP’s price list next fall.

A-Class systems only ran at 110MHz in the computer’s first generation, one-fourth of the PA-8500 processor’s full speed. This year’s models have only been bumped up to 150 and 200 MHz, still a fraction of the CPU’s true abilities. HP has unleashed the processor’s full power in HP 9000 models of the A-Class, but said it’s held back the low-end 3000 systems to distinguish value points in its lineup versus the more expandable N-Class.

HP began talking about the slowdown strategy once customers began asking about it early this year. The defense from HP has been that A-Class owners are happy with the performance of their systems. But technical experts in the 3000 vendor community know those owners could be happier, by at least a factor of four.

This summer one vendor tested the A-Class systems using a benchmark he’d devised using prime number calculations. The results indicated that the first generation of A-Class servers weren’t even delivering the 110MHz of speed HP was promising. Tests showed the systems were averaging more like 55MHz.

“As a result of doing MPE to HP-UX performance comparisons it has recently been determined that the ‘110MHz’ numbers appear to have been made up by HP marketing,” said Gavin Scott of Allegro Consultants. “These boxes actually only allow you to use about 55MHz out of the 440MHz available — so the ‘good news’ is that your ‘110MHz’ A-class MPE system will actually become about eight times faster in CPU speed when turned into an un-crippled HP-UX system.”

HP had already been twisting this widespread knowledge that the 3000 A-Class systems were being slowed down when Scott made his report. HP’s George Stachnik tried to convince customers at this year’s Webcasts that the systems — identified as crippled by customers and vendors alike — were a resource waiting to be unlocked. All the customers had to do was convert the 3000s to HP 9000s using HP’s free conversion kits, Stachnik said in more than one Webcast.

Scott pointed out that the cost difference between HP 9000 A-Class models and HP 3000s — about three times as much for the MPE systems, but including the IMAGE database — would make such converted systems a dubious value.

In the future, “You might be able to sell your MPE box with its then-rare MPE license for significantly more than it will cost you to buy a then-current HP-UX box of even greater performance.”

With the knowledge of the A-Class crippling spreading through the customer base, HP took a tentative step to make the A-Class servers march faster at the recent HP World conference. HP asked in a Special Interest Group meeting if customers might want to pay for the performance that’s being locked up now.

“After October of next year you’re not going to sell any machines anyway,” said SIG MPE chairman John Burke at the SIG’s meeting in Los Angeles. “This would be a nice thing to do for your customers as a going-away present.”

Dave Wilde, manager of the 3000 business operations at HP, said that offering extra performance on the A-Class servers “is something we could do. In offering different price points we could address some of the issues that we have. The question I have is what interest there is in that alternative?”

Wilde explained that increasing the A-Class servers’ performance would trigger a charge in line with the pricing HP is using. “Following the model that we have, we could extend the higher performance points at a higher price,” he said. Such a price increase “would not necessarily be linear,” he added.

Discussion about the strategy which followed in the meeting revolved not over whether HP might un-cripple the A-Class servers, but at what cost customers would be interested. Mike Paivinen, whose job at the 3000 division includes reviewing issues important to non-migrating customers, asked “How many customers would pay an extra $20,000 for a 440MHz A-Class?” The current price for a 150MHz system is just under $16,000.

Wilde said HP wants to find out if customers who might not want to pay all the extra money for an N-Class server would pay for extra performance consistent with HP’s model. “Consistent with the overall model might be a lot more than some people have in mind,” Paivinen pointed out at the meeting.

Customers at the meeting said the extra A-Class horsepower would have to come “at a reasonable value proposition.” Only $28,000 stands between a two-processor A-Class server and the $69,000 price tag at the bottom of the new N-Class lineup, but HP was considering who’d be interested in a system that occupied that gap.

HP has slowed down the processors in its newest models of the N-Class servers as well. One vendor’s technical expert who formerly worked for HP speculated that Processor Dependent Code, not versions of MPE, are responsible for slowdowns of the 380-MHz and 500-MHz N-Class servers.

“The ‘crippling’ code can’t reside in MPE itself,” said Christian Lheureux, a member of the OpenMPE board of directors. “It survives updates. And it’s a well-known fact that you can update any HP 3000 with any MPE tape, whatever the crippling factor. My best guess at this point would be, of course, PDC, which is not modified by updates.”