Chipset Capabilities
HP's philosophy is to deliver features that customers want for a class of products, without compromising schedule, performance or cost. HP's approach can be described as “lean and mean.” Rather than add every “bell and whistle,” HP focused on including only those features that power users of 1-4 way workstations and servers will value. For example, memory mirroring is not a feature of the HP zx1. This is a feature that takes redundancy to a point beyond the sweet spot of 1-4 way system users.
It is the most robust, most stable Itanium 2 chipset in the industry. The HP zx1 chipset was the turn-on vehicle for the Itanium 2 processor in early 2001. At that time, Itanium 2-based systems with the HP zx1 chipset were running UNIX, Linux®[40] and Windows ® [41]XP. It also has a memory capacity as low as 512MB and with an upper limit of 256GB.
[40] Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
[41] Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corp
The Target Market
HP's next generation Itanium 2-based workstations and servers are targeted at performance hungry markets—such as mechanical computer-aided design (MCAD), digital content creation (DCC), desktop computer-aided engineering (CAE), simulation/visualization, life sciences, research, secure web serving and business intelligence, that need huge memory space, leadership floating point performance—high memory and low latency. Furthermore, the affordable cost of the system will be extremely attractive to software developers and the education market.
One area where the chipset will excel is in large clusters of dual processor machines running Linux. There is demand for dense, dual-processor compute nodes with extreme floating point performance from national labs, and science and research institutions.
The HP zx1 Chipset supports HP-UX, Linux and Windows. HP-UX is the only enterprise UNIX OS available for Itanium® -based systems. Linux is popular in academic and scientific communities. Software developed on Linux can be deployed on both Linux and HP-UX.
Addressing Processor Infrastructure Needs
The HP zx1 Chipset addresses the volume Itanium processor infrastructure needs on several key fronts. It delivers all-important, world-class memory latency numbers that handily beat those of today's Itanium® systems. Intel has stated that users may see 1.5 to 2X performance increase over Itanium.
The HP Chipset zx1 is an ideal setting for the Intel Itanium 2 processor, because it complements the processor's price/performance. It will be of particular interest to the following clients:
Customers who are looking for the best price performance ratio for a 64-bit workstation or server, such as customers who want large numbers of systems for clusters, like those found in national laboratories and universities.
Customers who want leading performance from a workstation or a server that scales up to 4-way SMP.
Customers who have applications that benefit from parallel performance or have high memory throughput requirements, such as those found in the CAE, secure web serving, or DCC markets.
Today's IA-32 chipsets generally allow less than 4GB/s of processor bus bandwidth. The Intel Itanium 2 processor allows 6.4GB/s of processor bus bandwidth, and the bandwidth benefits are preserved across the chipset to ensure that data availability is optimal.