FlashPaper Sept. 2001: HP leans on PA-RISC longer for the 3000

September 2001

HP leans on PA-RISC longer for the 3000

In a subtle point made during HP’s latest look at the future of the e3000, its top planning manager for the platform said PA-RISC has an even longer lifespan for the system. Dave Snow reported that IA-64 technology, currently known as Itanium, wouldn’t appear for the HP 3000 line until “the second half of this decade.” That’s at least a one-year push past HP’s last guess about when PA-RISC’s replacement will be a good fit with the customer base. Snow said that there’s three more families of PA-RISC chips — the 8700, 8800, and 8900 — on the drawing boards for use in HP e3000s of the next four years. The division has always said it won’t bring on the Itanium chips until they show a clear performance advantage over PA-RISC, a sentiment that’s been repeated in the face of “we’re going Itanium all the way” quotes from higher ups in the HP management chain. Customers at the HP World conference were reporting plenty of performance from the newest N-Class systems they’d installed. HP only upshifted to the PA-RISC systems in the middle 1980s — the last major architecture shift for the 3000 — when the old Classic processors were well out of gas.

HP’s 3000 R&D manager Dave Wilde said the division has “made a lot of progress on its investigation” of IA-64, “and we understand what different alternatives exist for bringing MPE to IA-64. We’re not really at the point where we’re ready to start ramping up that work.”