HP 9000/735 & 755
| Quick Facts | |
|---|---|
| CPU | 1 PA-7100 99MHz/ 1 PA-7150 125MHz |
| Caches | 512KB L1 |
| RAM | 400MB (735) 768MB (755) |
| Drives | 2 SCSI (735) 4 SCSI (755) |
| Expansion | 1 SGC, 1 EISA, 1 spec (735) 2 SGC, 4 EISA (755) |
| Bandwidth | ? |
| I/O | 10E (or FDDI on 735) 2 SCSI 2 serial parallel HIL audio |
Overview
Project names:
The 735 and 755 are early-1990s technical and graphical workstations and
computing servers.
Both 735 (desktop) and 755 (tower) have a very solid and heavy casing and
are built with several circuit boards, seperate for I/O and CPU.
These boards, along with EISA cages and the storage subsystem are built into
so-called sliders
that can be removed separately from the system.
They support a large set of I/O buses, expansion options and drives.
The 735 was widely used as a FDDI node in Convex clusters and one of
the fastest RISC workstations running NeXTSTEP.
The 735 is built into a similar case to the HP 9000/720 workstations, and the CPU and I/O boards can be swapped between them (however only together).
Introduced: 1992 for
prices starting at $37,395 (735/99) and $58,995 (755/99).
Internals
CPU
Chipset
- ASP2 chipset, featuring:
- Cutoff ASIC, interfacing with memory (Viper) and I/O buses, provides address decoding, bus arbitration and interrupts
- Shortstop ASIC, coordinates data communication between the I/O buses and the mainbus
- NCR 53C700 8-bit single-ended SCSI-2
- NCR 53C720 16-bit Fast-Wide high-voltage differential (HVD) SCSI-2
- Intel 82596DX 10Mb Ethernet controller
- AMD Formac Plus Am79C830 FDDI controller
- WD16C552 parallel, plus additional functionality provided through Cutoff, e.g., Scanjet support
- NS16550A compatible serial
- 512KB EPROM - the Boot ROM
- 8KB EEPROM for storing system configuration status etc.
- Intel 8042 microprocessor controlling:
- battery backed RTC
- system & user timers
- audio generator
- HP-HIL interface
- frontpanel system status LEDs
- Viper memory and I/O controller
- Intel 82C501AD Ethernet transceiver
- Intel 82350 EISA bus adapter chipset (EISA to GSC)
- CS4215 CODEC for 16-bit stereo audio
Buses
- PBus processor/memory bus, 66MHz on 735/99 and 755/99 (264MB/s)
- VSC main system bus
- GSC system-level I/O bus
- EISA additional I/O expansion bus
- SGC expansion of the mainbus to the SGC expansion cards
- SCSI-2 narrow single-ended bus
- SCSI-2 Fast-Wide high-voltage differential (HVD) main storage I/O bus
Memory
- HP proprietary memory modules (same as 720, 730 and 750, and the Nova servers)
- 735: 8-32MB modules (most 64MB are unsupported and/or would not fit mechanically)
- 755: 8-64MB modules
- 12 sockets
- 735: 16MB onboard, 400MB (12×32+16) maximum
- 755: 768MB (12×64) maximum
- Memory has to be installed in pairs, from bank 0 to the outside on
both sides equally:
.______________. to backplane | |________________. | | | | | | | | | ##### | | | | | | | | | | | | | | #CPU# | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ##### | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 5 4 3 2 1 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 | |_______________________________| \ /
Expansion
- 735:
- One SGC (DIO-II formfactor) expansion slot
- One EISA slot
- One special daughter card slot for:
- A2665A - FDDI SAS daughter card with MIC connector
- A2658A - AUI Ethernet daughter card
- A2831A - ThinLAN Ethernet daughter card
- 755:
- Two SGC (DIO-II formfactor) expansion slots
- Four EISA slots
Drives
- 735: one tray for either two 3.5″ SCSI 68-pin Fast-Wide HVD or 50-pin narrow SE hard drives. Installed tray varies from model to model, 735/99 more often had the SE tray whereas the /125 models commonly had the F/W HVD tray.
- 755: one tray for two half-height 5.25″ SCSI drives and two trays for one full-height 5.25″ SCSI drive each
External connectors
- 50-pin HD SCSI-2 single-ended external
- 68-pin HD SCSI-3 Fast-Wide high-voltage differential HVD external
- Two standard RS232C serial
- DB25 parallel
- 735: 15-pin AUI or 10Base2 BNC Ethernet or FDDI SAS MIC connector
- 755: 15-pin AUI & 10Base2 BNC Ethernet connectors
- RGB BNC, depends on installed framebuffer, if at all
- HP-HIL connector for input devices
- Five phone jacks (microphone, headphones, line-in, line-out and speaker) (optional on 755)
References
Manuals
- Model 735 Service Handbook (PDF, 7.6MB)
Operating systems
- HP-UX: every release from 10.01-10.20 works.
- 10.20: works fine.
- 11.00: the March 2000 release should be the last one that runs on these machines. Newer install CDs may even do not start at all. General Patch Releases from a date later than 03/2000 could make the installation unusable. HP-UX 11.00 is officially unsupported on these machines however.
- 11i: officially unsupported on these systems, depending on the date of the installation CDs it might be possible to install it. It seems the system is stable once installed, however OS patches have to be carefully reviewed as some SCSI patches could render the system unusable.
- NeXTSTEP: Version 3.3 works fine, but the 53C720 Fast-Wide HVD SCSI subsystem and the FDDI boards are unsupported.
- Linux: works.
- OpenBSD: works fine.
- NetBSD: experimental support as of 5/2005, but the 53C720 Fast-Wide HVD SCSI controller is not supported.
Benchmarks
| Model | SPEC95, int | SPEC95, fp | SPEC95 rate, int |
SPEC95 rate, fp |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| /99 | 3.22 | 4.06 | 29.4 | 35.8 |
| /125 | 3.97 | 4.61 | 36.3 | 40.9 |
Compare these with other results on the Benchmarks page.