HP 9000 Series 800 Nova Servers
Overview
Project names - uname
- F10: Nova8 - 9000/807
- F20: Nova Low - 9000/817
- F30: Nova High - 9000/837
- G30/H30: Nova High - 9000/847
- G40/H40: Nova64 - 9000/867
- G50/H50: TNova - 9000/887
- G60/H60: TNova96 - 9000/887
- G70/H70: Hydra96 - 9000/887
- H20: Nova Low - 9000/827
- I30: Nova High - 9000/857
- I40: Nova64 - 9000/877
- I50: TNova - 9000/897
- I60: TNova96 - 9000/897
- I70: Hydra96 - 9000/897
Introduction
- 1991-1993
The Nova Servers were the second-generation PA-RISC based servers from HP, released around 1990. They were available in many different sizes with different expansion options, CPU types and clock speeds. But all have several aspects in common:
- Heavy & massive casing
- Noisy
- Need lots of electrical power
- Four status LEDs at front-panel
- No video output — serial console on a MUX panel or mini-DIN
All Nova servers had a unique naming convention:
- The front letter [F, G, H, I] indicates the
external
features, like casing and expansion - The latter number [10, 20, …, 70] indicates the
internal
features, like CPU and chipset
Internals
CPU
- F10: PA-7000 32MHz with 32/64KB off-chip I/D L1 cache
- x20: PA-7000 48MHz with 64/64KB off-chip I/D L1 cache
- x30: PA-7000 48MHz with 256/256KB off-chip I/D L1 cache
- x40: PA-7000 64MHz with 256/256KB off-chip I/D L1 cache
- x50: PA-7100 96MHz with 256/256KB off-chip I/D L1 cache
- x60: PA-7100 96MHz with 1024/1024KB off-chip I/D L1 cache
- x70: 1-2 PA-7100 96MHz with 2048/2048KB off-chip I/D L1 cache each
On systems with PA-7000 processors the FPU was optional — there is often an empty socket on the CPU boards of these systems.
Chipset
Based upon lots of HP custom ASICs with strange names, almost the complete peripheral I/O is
realized with HP-PB cards and so called Personality Boards.
There exists nearly nil documentation on the internals of these old systems, besides some
code snippets in Mach/Lites 4.4 for PA-RISC.
This renders any efforts to port a modern, open
operating system to this platform more or less unrealistic,
since no qualified documentation is freely available or expected to become so in the future.
» View a system-level illustration (ASCII) of the 807-877 chipset.
Buses
- HP-PB bus for the general I/O
- SCSI-2 Narrow single-ended bus for main storage I/O
Memory
- HP proprietary modules
- 12 slots
- F10: 16MB minimum, 128MB (8×16MB) maximum
- F20 and F30: 16MB minimum, 192MB (12×16MB) maximum
- H20, H30, G30, I30, x40: 16MB minimum, 384MB (12×32MB) maximum
- x50, x60, x70: 16MB minimum, 768MB (12×64MB) maximum
Expansion
- Fx0: 2 HP-PB single-height slots
or one double-height - Gx0: 6 HP-PB single-height slots
or 3 double-height - Hx0: 6 HP-PB single-height slots
or 3 double-height - Ix0: 12 HP-PB single-height slots
or 6 double-height
Drives
- ? (lots)
External Connectors
- 50-pin HD SCSI-2 single-ended
- High-pin-count MUX connector
- DB25 female parallel
- Rest depends on installed HP-PB cards
References
- Pinout for the mini-DIN console connector at the back
Operating Systems
The only operating system that runs on these servers is HP-UX — all of these servers are officially supported in versions 10.20 for 800s servers and 11.00. (The first supported release was HP-UX 8.02.) Official support for the Nova servers was dropped in 11.11 (11i), however it is still possible in most cases to install and run 11i on these systems, although the OS patches must be carefully reviewed as some could very well break the system (e.g. patches to the SCSI-subsystem).
Benchmarks
| Model | SPEC92, int | SPEC92, fp | MIPS |
|---|---|---|---|
| F10 | 22.0 | 36.6 | 35 |
| x20 | 33.6 | 56.1 | 53 |
| x30 | 37.8 | 62.4 | 53 |
| x40 | 65.2 | 91.3 | 70 |
| x50 | 100.0 | 158.5 | 115 |
| x60 | 108.8 | 195.3 | 115 |
| x70 | 108.8 | 195.3 | 115 |
All results are for single-CPU systems.
Compare these with other results on the Benchmarks page.