The E35 server was introduced by HP in late 1993. It was one of a new family of entry-level systems within the Series 800 family, positioned with the objective of offering the lowest price point business server system.
The servers were powered by a PA7100LC CPU. This was a new low-cost, 32 bit superscalar PA-RISC processor including two integer arithmetic and logic units, a floating-point coprocessor, and a memory and I/O controller - on a single VLSI chip with 900,000 transistors.
Running at 64 MHz in the E35, the chip achieved performance levels comparable to those of previous generation high-end systems while lowering overall system cost and power consumption to make possible a new generation of low-cost systems.
Compare the transistor count on this processor with the 1.72 billion transistors on the Itanium 2 processor in the rx2620! The transistor count roughly doubles every year for the 11 years separating the two processors.
Another first for the E-series servers was support for industry standard x36 or x40 ECC memory SIMMs. Maximum memory support at first release was 256MB through the use of eight 32MB SIMMs. As of May '94 a 128MB SIMM pair became available allowing 512MB of system memory.
Click here to download an article from the 1995 Hewlett Packard Journal discussing the development of the E-class platform. |
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