HP Upgrades Superdome
Faster Processor
Hewlett-Packard Co. said Monday it had added a faster processor to its flagship Unix server, Superdome.
HP now offers an 875MHz processor, the PA-8700+ PA-RISC chip, in its top-of-the-line server. Superdome is available in configurations from 1- to 64-way. The server runs HP’s Unix flavor HP-UX
It is unclear how long HP will continue to refresh its Unix line with the proprietary PA-RISC chips. HP has stated publicly that it would migrate its Unix server line to the Intel Itanium processor, but continue to offer PA-RISC as long as there is significant customer demand. The recent announcement of HP-UX 11i on Intel processors indicated it would run on 64 Itanium chips, so HP could soon offer a Intel version of Superdome.
Accompanying the upgrade announcement was the disclosure of several benchmarks of Superdome with the new chip. HP says it set a new record for the TPC-H data warehousing benchmark. A configuration running Oracle 9i performed 25,805 queries per hour at a cost of $213 per query per hour. It also trumpeted performance on the SPECjbb Java benchmark and the TPC-C benchmark.
About the Author
Chris McConnell is Product and Technology Editor for Enterprise Systems.