HP Introduces Final Processor in PA-RISC Family

The HP Way writes "According to an article on InformationWeek, HP announced the immediate availability of the 800 MHz, 1.0 GHz, and 1.1 GHz dual-core PA-8900 with 64MB on die L2 cache, the last member of the PA-RISC family of microprocessors. Customers with Superdome chassis can install Itanium 2 CPUs alongside PA-8900 processors."

Comments

Another one bites the dust.

[darkjedi521]

Yet another CPU architecture bites the dust in favor of the behemoth that is Intel.

Re:Another one bites the dust.

[linguae]

It is truly a sad state of affairs when it comes to processors. In the PC market, now that Apple has been consolidated^Wswitched to Intel, now the x86 is the only architecture available, either from Intel or from AMD. The Alpha is dead, the PPC is now relegated to game consoles, the MIPS is relegated to embedded computers and SGI workstations, and the SPARC is also relegated to Sun workstations. There is no choice for me at all. Unless I want to shell out $5000 or more for a brand spanking new Sun/SGI workstation, scrounge on eBay to find old Alphas, or buy myself a Mac within the next year now, I will be stuck with the x86....forever.

Rob Pike said it best five years ago: there is no innovation in computer architecture and systems software at all. Everybody is focused on being "cheap" and "compatable," but nobody is focused on making an architecture that is elegant and of good quality. Nobody wants to make a new architecture that blows everything else out of the water. Nobody wants to revolutionize operating systems (I'm talking about the architecture, not the usability; Apple's doing well in the usability department). Simply put, nobody wants to try something different. And anything that wasn't Microsoft or Intel technology ends up getting destroyed. Unix was spared, but market consolidation between Unix variants and Microsoft operating systems killed many operating systems (VMS, pre-OS X Macintosh, the various Lisp operating systems, etc.). Anything new and innovative seems to be held back (for example, look at Plan 9 and Hurd).

I just wish someone would be innovative and produce architectures that advance computer science and computer engineering rather than by just "going with the flow." I want to see something fresh and new on the market. I want to have the same processor choices that people enjoyed back in the 1980s. I want to see something new coming out of those factories and those universities. I don't want architecture research to die forever. I don't want Netcraft confirming that alternative architectures are dead. I don't want Intel and AMD to be the only avenues to buy CPUs: what happens when they impose DRM on us? Intel and AMD are already in the Trusted Computing Group. Who would we run to once Microsoft demands the use of DRM'd processors in Windows 2010 and Intel and AMD begin producing their DRM-encumbered processors? We need choice, and we need change before it's too late.

Until then, where can I buy PPC, SPARC, or MIPS motherboards?

Damn

[Stevyn]

Before anyone says anything about the clock speed not being fast compared to Intel or AMID offerings, 64MB of cache is a heeeelll of a lot of cache. So all those delays from cache misses can be spent doing something meaningful...like processing.

Survival of the strongest

[3770]

I guess it is survival of the strongest.

Intel is winning the war but it is sad to see some of the's CPU's go the way of the dodo.

The untimely death of the Alpha was the worst.

Re:Survival of the strongest

[imsabbel]

but looking back, the alpha wasnt powered by magic either....
It was way faster than anything else, but it bought that kind of dominance by using something that now limits x86: A massive power budget.
Alphas used 80W+ back in times when 25W of a pentium2 seemed horrendious, so its not that miraculous that they got more performance out of it.

I blame the Itanium

[SoupIsGood Food]

This is a fairly sad state of affairs... the processor family really has some legs left to it, but it was killed by HP for mostly political reasons. Itanium has never really delivered the goods, and is likely to be killed sooner rather than later by Intel, who does not know how to run a small volume/high margin performance chip line. (See: i860, i960) nor does it really see the value in such products.

Wherer this will leave HP is anyone's guess. Off-the-shelf Pentiums or Opterons can't really compete with POWER or Fujitsu's next gen SPARC designs. x86 Unix systems have largely been also-rans... Data General, Sequent(Now IBM xSeries), even Sun's new Opteron boxes are largely a side show to their SPARC business.

The Itanium, and the bone-headed wintel-centric management who pursued the pipedream of IA-64, killed off a lot of prime high-performance processor srchitectures: Alpha, Mips, and now PA-RISC. These aren't market or competitive pressures ('cuz IBM's doing just fine with bespoke silicon at the high end), but political mangement dictates that turned some premier computer science powerhouses into shambling wrecks. I mean, what the hell has SGI done in half a decade that's caused anyone to talk about them in positive terms? Nada.

This "mass extinction" of competing hardware architectures is not good for innovation. The Wintel PC is not the pinnical of hardware architectures, it's pretty bass-ackward and stone age compared to what used to be out there. Sad times.

SoupIsGood Food

Re:I blame the Itanium

[Waffle Iron]

This "mass extinction" of competing hardware architectures is not good for innovation.

The user-visible instruction set doesn't matter anymore. There's a wide variety of different architectures under the hood of the various x86-compatible implementations, and these will continue to evolve and improve. The real CPU architecture looks nothing at all like the interface presented to the programmer; this is even true for most recent RISC chips.

If non x86-compatible instruction sets provided a significant benefit, then CPUs using them would have been able to hold a substantial and lasting performance lead over the x86-compatible CPUs. But they haven't. When somebody claims that an alternative CPU architecture is beating the top-end x86 chips, it's usually just because they've slapped a massive cache next to the core. It has little if anything to do with the instruction architecture itself. The x86 instruction format is just a standardized compact bytecode that is translated to the latest features by each generation of x86-compatible microprocessor.

If you can make essentially the same progress without breaking compatibility with a huge body of software which has received so much massive investment, what good does it do to break compatibility?

Re:I blame the Itanium

[10Ghz]

the processor family really has some legs left to it, but it was killed by HP for mostly political reasons

Are these CPU's REALLY that good in the end? I mean, if we look at this particular CPU: It has 64MB of L2-cache. Now, is this really a kick-ass CPU, or is it a mediocre CPU that hides it's crappiness behind lots and lots of cache? How would Opteron (for example) perform if it were equipped with 64MB of L2-cache? I would bet that it would walk all over this chip.

Yes, this CPU is propably pretty fast. But it seems to me that they gained that performance by having an assload of cache. And that costs ALOT of money. What I would like to see is truly kick-ass CPU's, that kick ass by default, instead of having to rely on assloads of cache in order to get acceptable performance.

Re:I blame the Itanium

[Waffle Iron]

The PA-RISC, Alpha, and Mips chip families were all way out in front of the x86 before they were put into maintenance mode by HP and SGI in anticipation of the IA-64 architecture, which never did deliver on it's price/performance promises.

That was before the x86 decoupled the inner workings from the instruction set. That's ancient history.

IBM's POWER is way out in front of the performance sweepstakes, and unlikely to be axed any time soon on the P and R series servers. Ditto the Z-series "SuperCISC" mainframe processors.

All of that is due to insane cache sizes, heavy I/O bus technology, and the hugely expensive packaging that goes with them. Cram all of that around an x86 core and you'd get similar results.

The "skin" required to make the instruction set work with bleeding edge designs like Cell just isn't worth the hassle or performance overhead.

The Cell isn't just one processor; it's a processor plus a bunch of DSPs. Nothing is stopping you from adding a bunch of DSPs to an x86 die.

The x86 instruction set is bloated and crippled

The subset of instructions that modern compilers actually issue aren't bloated, and they use up fewer bytes than space-hogging RISC opcodes. The "bloated" instructions of old are handled by a little bit of microcode if they are encountered. The x86-32 was somewhat crippled, but that was mostly worked around with tricks like renaming. The x86-64 isn't crippled.

and making the Itanium interoperable with it nearly sunk the chip entirely.

It was sunk because they thought that they could get away with shoving most of the branch prediction logic up to the compiler, which doesn't know anything about the actual runtime conditions. While the idea seemed appealing, it didn't work. An other example of how "advanced" instruction set architectures don't really buy you anything in the real world.

Allan Kay was dead right in that hardware needs to accommodate the programmer, not the other way around.

That's right, it needs to do the job as good as any alternative without making the programmers rewrite all of the software in existence.

Re:I blame the Itanium

[akuma(x86)]

This is a fairly sad state of affairs... the processor family really has some legs left to it, but it was killed by HP for mostly political reasons

If by "political", you mean "save a ton of money and increase profitability" then yes.

Computer manufacturers are in the business of making money. The ONLY reason to build a computer is to make money.

In case you hadn't noticed yet -- designing microprocessors is astronomically expensive. Because PA-RISC is such a low volume product, it makes little financial sense to pour billions of dollars into it when your return on investment is negative. It's the same reason that HP doesn't design and fab their own DRAM.

Off-the-shelf Pentiums or Opterons can't really compete with POWER or Fujitsu's next gen SPARC designs. x86 Unix systems have largely been also-rans... Data General, Sequent(Now IBM xSeries), even Sun's new Opteron boxes are largely a side show to their SPARC business.

I guess you haven't seen any SPEC or TPC benchmarks lately. You must by using 1990s technology. x86 is very competitive with SPARC and POWER. In fact, it isn't even a contest if you were to equip the x86es with the same sized caches of their POWER and SPARC counterparts.

IBM microelectronics loses money every single year. Sun has a negative return on investment for SPARC. 10 years from now, you won't have have SPARC or POWER machines built anymore.

Sun's Opteron boxes were necessary to hide the abyssmal performance of SPARC.

These aren't market or competitive pressures ('cuz IBM's doing just fine with bespoke silicon at the high end), but political mangement dictates that turned some premier computer science powerhouses into shambling wrecks.

Look up the latest Edgar financial filings on IBM and read about their microelectronics division. They lose money every single year. If one of the largest computer companies in the world can't make money with their own semiconductor division, what does that say? Obviously they are not competitive.

This "mass extinction" of competing hardware architectures is not good for innovation. The Wintel PC is not the pinnical of hardware architectures, it's pretty bass-ackward and stone age compared to what used to be out there

x86 has the most innovative microarchitectures on the planet. How you do you think they compete performance-wise with more elegant ISAs? It isn't just Wintel anymore. It's Apple-Intel, Win-AMD, Win-tel, Linux-tel, Linux-AMD.

There will still be competition. AMD competes with Intel pretty well which keeps the trend of innovation going. Even Intel must compete with Intel. Who is going to buy a new computer if all Intel does is release something that does not have value over the previous generation?

That's a real disappointment

[davecb]

A company that used to build some of the best instruments and some lovely workstations slowly winds down to the xxx-on-intel junkyard.

It's even disappointing to an employee of the competition: I **liked** competing with H-P, they always kept me on my toes.

--dave

Unsuitable mission-critical systems?

[CyricZ]

With the demise of HP-UX on PA-RISC, I fear we are going to see unsuitable systems used for mission-critical applications. HP-UX and PA-RISC are both widely known for their fault tolerance and extreme reliability. They're the kind of OS and computer architecture you trust to run the control systems of a nuclear power plant, or the financial transactions of a major stockmarket.

Re:Goliath

[tomstdenis]

AMDs implementation of x86_{32|64} is a bit more sane and performs much better.

Sure the x86 ISA is bloated but once you get past the decoder it's all RISC underneath baby.

Tom

Well look at every new CPU to see if RISC matter!

[renoX]

Uh, how the PA-RISC, PPC, Sparc failures in the PC or server has anything related to the RISC concept?

If memory serves, the G5 has 1/4 the number of transistor of the P4 and it was competitive in performance.
The problem is more that even with much less transistors the economy of scales of x86 (and the intense competition between AMD and Intel), made the price very low, thus allowing x86 to compete with RISCs where it matters in the price/performance ratio, Windows and software compatibility made the rest..

Have you noticed how any new CPU is RISC?
ARM, SH, etc.. Even VLIW follow RISC conventions (fixed instruction length, load/store architecture, etc..).
So it really is a better CPU architecture than CISC but being better doesn't necessarily that you win, as shown by many examples..

Re:consolidation is good

[evilviper]

There is market room for at least 3, and possibly 4 architectures out there

That's interesting, because all the different architectures were doing quite well, until Intel spread all the BS about how Itanium was going to destroy them all if they didn't jump on the bandwagon.

This is a very good read:
http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/archives/old/gsb -archive/gsb2001-06-29.html

We seem to be very quickly approaching one single CPU, and not for technical or economic reasons, but simply because of Intel bluffing everyone into submission.

Re:Did RISC really matter? Nope.

[0racle]

Don't bring facts into a xenophobic argument about visas and how the United States should shield its self from the evils of the rest of the world, which come in the form of foreign engineers and workers.

Re:Did RISC really matter? Nope.

[Ed Avis]

I think you are being a little unfair in comparing the early RISC chips with processors from today. Instead you should compare them with non-RISC processors of the same era, such as the 80286.

BTW: ARM is the biggest selling processor family.

Re:"standards"

[foorilious]

This is one of my biggest pet peeves in IT journalism. How Intel CPUs are always "industry standard," and everything else is "proprietary." Tell me again how x86 isn't proprietary? SPARC is actually somewhat open, as described here. Now, I'm not saying it's open like GPL software is open, but there's an IEEE standard for the SPARC instruction set, and anyone can license the SPARC specification. There have always been two distinct vendors (Sun and Fujitsu) selling different but compatible SPARC implementations. Even after the APL goes into effect, I believe each vendor will still have SPARC chips not covered by that agreement (each vendor's low-end line).

Now, x86 has both Intel and AMD making compatible chips, but they actually have a license agreement. AMD pays Intel royalties, and it's even rumored that Intel has the right under that agreement to cap AMD's production volume. To me, it starts looking like AMD is a pet Intel keeps around to be able to say, "but we're not a monopoly, look at AMD!" You only need to look at Microsoft's legal history to see why that'd be a smart move.

"Commodity" is the other term consistently abused in discussions like this. When people say Intel CPUs are "commodity" and "industry-standard", what they mean to say is that they are "cheap" and that there are "lots of them."

Re:Did RISC really matter? Nope.

[fermion]

The fact is that if anything is dead, it is CISC, and it's remnants result in massive ineffeciencies. The current chip designs, IRRC, are a hybrid. Intel was going down a bad road. Huge clock rates to compensate for the ineffeciency of the prememptive cache. The huge clocks rates then needed more preemptive cache to fill it. These requires larger circuits, that generated heat, the needed fan to cool the box, that need HVAC to cool the rooms, that wasted 10X more power than was used in the processing.

RISC solved many of these ineffeciencies, and were integrated. But like anything, it was not the silver bullet. So, as technolgy and nature does, it merged and created a more resiliant hybrid, which is where we are. If the PC manufacturers were as brutal as Apple, and left thier legacy mistakes behind, the Intel would be much more RISC.