HP rolls out more powerful Itanium components

HP last week announced a new chipset and a module for Itanium 2 servers at the Spring Intel Developer Forum in San Jose that allow better performance at a lower cost.

The two components, the sx1000 chipset and the HP mx2 dual-processor module, let users save money by upgrading existing servers and double the number of Itanium 2 processors that can be used in a server.

The sx1000 chipset affords high-speed interaction between server processors, I/O and memory. It supports Madison version Itanium 2 processors and PA-8800 RISC based servers, codenamed Mako. With the sx1000, existing PA-RISC customers can upgrade to Itanium-based servers simply with a board swap. It will be used in high-end and midrange computers.

The mx2 dual-processor module combines future Itanium 2 processors and a 32M-byte L4 cache onto a single daughter-sized card, code named Hondo, that is compatible with Intel’s Itanium 2 Madison processors.

With the doubled processors, customers can increase the workloads running on the processors and achieve greater system performance for workloads that require CPU scalability without moving to a higher-cost chassis with more processor sockets. The dual-processor module will be used in the first half of 2004 in entry-level to high-end servers from HP.

HP also announced it will ship an sx1000-based version of its high-end Superdome server by the middle of this year. Midrange servers in the rp7400 and rp8499 class using the chipset will ship later this year. Servers that use the mx2 module are expected to be available in the first half of 2004.