FlashPaper: What will Bravehawk look like?

May 1998

Click here for Adager sponsor message

What will Bravehawk look like?

There’s lots of life left in the PA-RISC processor family for HP 3000s, despite idle reports of scrapping the chip which were printed in a recent issue of InformationWeek as that magazine sized up the future of Unix. HP will be relying on PA-RISC for years to come in HP 3000s, including a system being called Bravehawk that’s expected for release later this year. HP has hinted that the machine will be numbered as a Series 989, but that won’t tell you as much as the specs for the HP 9000 versions of the system, which were introduced earlier this spring. The K370 and K570 HP 9000s are based on PA-8200 processors, limited only by the number of HSC fast/wide SCSI channels you can get out of them.

The K-Series on the HP 9000 side aligns closely with the 9x9 line of HP 3000s. The K370’s MFIO card for it even mentions “989” on it, and it uses 200Mhz PA-8200 processors. Stock configuration is up to four processors, but you can take this K-class box up to 6-way interleaved if give up one fast I/O expansion slot to get the additional two processors. A customer that has both 3000 99x systems and these new K370s installed reported “This is one honker of a machine. They can easily outrun most of the 99x systems out there, although they don’t have quite the I/O expansion real estate.” The customer notes that the systems have one downside common to the high end of HP 3000s: they take up to 15 minutes to self-test, with four processors and 1Gb of memory, after a reboot. Luckily for 3000 customers, reboots are more rare than for K-Series owners running HP-UX.

Copyright 1998 The 3000 NewsWire. All rights reserved



		Click here for Adager sponsor message
		What will Bravehawk look like? There’s lots of life left in the PA-RISC processor family for HP 3000s, despite idle reports of scrapping the chip which were printed in a recent issue of InformationWeek as that magazine sized up the future of Unix. HP will be relying on PA-RISC for years to come in HP 3000s, including a system being called Bravehawk that’s expected for release later this year. HP has hinted that the machine will be numbered as a Series 989, but that won’t tell you as much as the specs for the HP 9000 versions of the system, which were introduced earlier this spring. The K370 and K570 HP 9000s are based on PA-8200 processors, limited only by the number of HSC fast/wide SCSI channels you can get out of them. The K-Series on the HP 9000 side aligns closely with the 9x9 line of HP 3000s. The K370’s MFIO card for it even mentions “989” on it, and it uses 200Mhz PA-8200 processors. Stock configuration is up to four processors, but you can take this K-class box up to 6-way interleaved if give up one fast I/O expansion slot to get the additional two processors. A customer that has both 3000 99x systems and these new K370s installed reported “This is one honker of a machine. They can easily outrun most of the 99x systems out there, although they don’t have quite the I/O expansion real estate.” The customer notes that the systems have one downside common to the high end of HP 3000s: they take up to 15 minutes to self-test, with four processors and 1Gb of memory, after a reboot. Luckily for 3000 customers, reboots are more rare than for K-Series owners running HP-UX. Copyright 1998 The 3000 NewsWire. All rights reserved