HP's 712/60 uses innovative hardware packaging and the superscalar PA-7100LC CPU to achieve a low-cost, high-performance Unix workstation
Ben Smith
On the outside, the Hewlett-Packard 9000 Series 700 Model 712/60 looks like one of HP's Apollo workstations. The $3995 price tag tells you it isn't. This shockingly low price is for a complete stand-alone system with a 15-inch 1024- by 768-pixel color display, built-in 8-bit graphics, 16 MB of RAM, and a 260-MB hard drive. The Model 712/60 sacrifices neither performance nor usability to achieve its low price; the key is packaging and HP's new PA-7100LC processor. The unit I tested sells for $7680 and came with 64 MB of RAM, a 20-inch color monitor, and a 260-MB hard drive.
My first impression of a Unix workstation's perf
ormance typically comes from the response of the user interface: How fast do applications launch and windows move? This subjective appraisal of workstation performance correlates well with my enjoyment of a system. Even on the 20-inch 1280- by 1024-pixel display that came with the reviewed unit, the Model 712/60's graphics system is remarkably fast. The system provides great graphics performance even with HP-VUE, HP's elegant yet resource-demanding Motif-based window and session manager.
The BYTE benchmarks proved that the Model 712/60's performance is good by more than just subjective measures, but the tests bring a few surprises as well (see the table "Performance Results"). The string sort is unexpectedly slow, probably due to the extra work required to manipulate data that is not aligned on even word boundaries.
Workstation Usability
When so many new Unix workstations require a minimum of 32 MB of RAM and a 500-MB hard drive, it might seem unlikely that a system with only half that much m
emory and disk capacity would be useful, or even usable. However, HP has created a reduced version of its HP-UX operating system, called Desktop/UX, for its new entry systems. The 260-MB hard drive holds the entire operating system plus the required swap space and still has more than 100 MB left over for data and applications. Desktop/UX is still an XPG4 certified version of HP's most recent release of Unix, HP-UX 9.03.
What's missing? Desktop/ UX includes a Posix C compiler, but not the ANSI compiler. It provides HP's on-line hypertext-based workstation documentation, but not the full Unix man pages or any text-processing utilities. Appropriately omitted are many system accounting, development, and management systems that are applicable only to servers.
Desktop/UX is all that most nontechnical workstation users require for applications like financial trading, customer service, and document management. Applications developers, image manipulators, engineers, and other more technical users will wa
nt more resources and the full-blown Runtime/UX. For these more demanding uses, the Model 712/60 can enclose as much as 128 MB of RAM and 1 GB of disk capacity. (Local external drives can take mass storage all the way up to 14 GB.)
HP-VUE has always been one of the more appealing and worthwhile window managers, and the new HP-VUE 3.0 design is even more attractive and intuitive. You can now drag any icon from the file manager to the background of any of the work spaces, and it will stick to that work area. Modifying HP-VUE's control bar (what HP calls the front panel) still requires that you edit a configuration file, but HP now documents the process clearly and completely in the help viewer.
Perhaps the most important improvement in usability for nontechnical workstation users concerns a small button on the front of the system--the power switch. When you push the switch in, the system boots; let it out with another push, and the system goes through an orderly shutdown. The Model 712/60 may not
be the first system to have such a button, but the feature should be emulated on all low-end Unix systems.
Inside Look
If it wasn't for HP's reputation for building durable systems, I would have questioned what I found when I first opened up the 712/60 (see the photo on page 165). But a little thought and analysis overrode any doubt that this machine is robust.
My first reaction was that someone forgot to remove the packing material from the disk drives. The drives are mounted in plastic foam, and it first appears that only a single spring-metal clip holds them in place. In fact, the whole interlocking structure of the workstation's case keys them to stay snugly in position. Not only is this a no-tools maintenance design like those found in Silicon Graphics' workstations, it is also simple and inexpensive.
The next items to catch my attention were the power supply and fan, which are encased in plastic, not sheet metal. Because of the low power requirements of this PA-7100LC-based syste
m (with a maximum power output of 70 W), the power supply can be small, and it therefore generates only a tiny amount of heat. The small fan is nearly inaudible.
What you might not notice right away is the diminutive CPU board. Clipped into place by spring plastic tabs extending up from the chassis base, the 11- by 5-inch motherboard appears less complex and sophisticated than most PC peripheral boards. But, as with many highly evolved designs, simplicity is the hallmark of quality and doesn't represent a lack of sophistication.
Nothing in this system is more sophisticated than its processor. HP's PA-7100LC is a low-power, low-cost RISC design with floating-point and integer processors integrated in the same chip. This 32-bit RISC processor has the clever ability to split 32-bit words into two 16-bit operations when appropriate. Since the PA-7100LC has two ALUs, partial word operations, such as in MPEG and JPEG compression and decompression, run nearly twice as fast as they do with processors th
at have a single ALU.
The Model 712/60 runs its PA-7100LC at 60 MHz and uses an external 64-KB direct-mapped cache for both instructions and data. The cache can communicate with the CPU at up to 400 MBps over the 64-bit-wide bus.
Color Recovery
Also clever is the way the 8-bit color graphics system handles 24-bit graphics. It uses hardware dithering that looks for all the world like true 24-bit color. HP calls it Color Recovery.
A special device driver (software) takes the 24-bit color data from the application program and encodes it in a special 8-bit format that a hardware decoder can use for its color calculations. Color-map corrections, edge detection, gamma correction, and precision floating-point operations are all carried out in the digital signal processorlike ASIC (application-specific IC) that HP designed for this purpose.
On close inspection, you can see that the 24-bit color emulation is more like antialiasing than the conventional ditty-dot dithering that you might
find on an 8-bit-color Silicon Graphics workstation. Color Recovery doesn't work with just any application; low-level Xlib-based applications that require 24-bit color will have to be reworked. However, applications using most 3-D APIs need only be written to use a 24-bit true-color model. This implies that the Color Recovery process probably doesn't offer much for 24-bit 2-D applications, such as photo manipulation and video.
The array of connectors at the back of the Model 712/60 contains a full complement of external ports: parallel, asynchronous serial (a 16550A UART [universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter] capable of 460.8 Kbps), both twisted-pair and AUI (attachment unit interface) Ethernet connectors, and SCSI-2 (Alt-1 50-pin high density), as well as audio in and audio out. The keyboard and mouse ports are AT plug-compatible.
As options, you can add a second monitor, a second serial port, a second network interface, and a PC-compatible 31/2-inch floppy drive. (SoftWindows and many W
abi-based applications are also available for further PC compatibility.) What you do not see in the Model 712/60 that you would find in HP's Model 715 workstation are EISA slots for upgrading. There is, however, plenty of space in the cabinet for a larger CPU board.
Not Just Another Workstation
You can purchase a Pentium-based PC for roughly the same price as this entry-level HP workstation. Open that PC, and you will find a large motherboard cluttered with cables and metal mounting brackets and bristling with peripheral cards. You can purchase a Unix license or install Linux (the freely available Unix clone) on your Pentium. However, you won't end up with half the quality and stability of the HP Model 712/60, with its mature and up-to-date version of Unix, its X Window System, and the HP-VUE user interface.
With an increasing number of corporate buyers now considering RISC-based workstations instead of Pentium systems, HP is offering a viable alternative. Using its powerful, low-cost PA-7100
LC CPU, innovative package engineering, and intelligent usability features, HP has delivered an outstanding entrant to the low-end workstation market.
The Facts
Hewlett-Packard 9000 Series 700 Model 712/60 $7680
(as tested, with 64 MB of RAM, 20-inch color
monitor, and 260-MB hard drive)
Hewlett-Packard Direct
Building 51 LS
P.O. Box 58059
Santa Clara, CA 95051
(800) 637-7740
Performance Results
BYTE's benchmarks are indexed. For the Unix benchmarks, a Sun SparcStation 1+ with 16 MB of RAM running SunSoft 4.3 = 1. For the BYTE portable benchmarks, the baseline system is a 66-MHz 486DX2 PC. The 712/60 does very well on the Unix benchmarks, but it doesn't show up well on the simple string-sort test in the portable benchmarks. This is probably due to the extra work required to manipulate data that is not aligned on even word boundaries.
TEST INDEX
Unix benchmarks
Arithmetic (type = double
) 4.4
Dhrystone 2 without register variables 2.3
Execl throughput 4.3
File copy (30 seconds) 15.3
Pipe-based context switching 1.0
Shell scripts (eight concurrent) 3.2
Portable benchmarks
Numeric sort 1.72
String sort 0.52
Bit map 2.33
Integer math 1.14
Floating-point emulation 3.59
Simple FPU 2.88
Transcendental FPU 3.66
Overall integer index 1.54
Overall FPU index 3.25
Photograph: Despite its simplicity and low cost, HP made the 712/60 easier to use for business users. The power button starts an orderly shutdown, for example. The user interface (VUE) control bar is intuitive and easy to configure.
Photograph: Using low-cost materials such as the foam sandwic
h disk mount, the Model 712/60 looks as though designed by a toy manufacturer. However, HP maintains its reputation for building durable equipment. This isn't cheap engineering; it's good engineering.
Ben Smith is a BYTE testing editor and is the author of Unix Step-by-Step (Hayden Books, 1990). He can be contacted on the Internet at
ben@bytepb.byte.com
or on BIX as "bensmith."
Power Workstation at a Pentium Price
