HP Debuts zx1 Chipset for McKinley Itaniums

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Pluto chipset was developed by the same team of engineers at HP that created the chipsets for HP's Visualize line of Intel and PA-RISC workstations and its entry HP 9000 Unix servers. The chipsets in a number of HP's existing entry servers were designed, in fact, to support the first-generation "Merced" Itanium chips, although because of performance, power, and other issues HP does not allow Itaniums to be plugged into these machines. The point is, as the world well knows, HP has had its marketing and engineering focused on creating hybrid PA-RISC and Itanium workstations and servers for six years, and it is no surprise that as Intel finally gets decent Itanium chips to market later this year, HP will be ready to snap at the opportunity it presents for the company in the core Unix midrange market that it dominates and to expand itself into the Windows and Linux worlds that it covets. That is what the Pluto chipset is all about--HP leveraging its expertise in Unix servers for the Windows and Linux markets while helping it preserve its position in the Unix market.

The zx1 chipset can be used to create McKinley workstations using one or two processors and McKinley servers using from one to four processors. The McKinleys, which are expected at speeds in the 1 GHz range, will offer performance that is from 1.5 to 2 times that of the 800 MHz Merceds because of substantial architectural changes. Sources at HP say that it expects to be able to deliver McKinley workstations running at around twice the speed of current Merced machines (which have barely sold at all because they have hardly any software available for them) for about half the price. This is a quadrupling in price/performance, something that has not been possible since the early days of the RISC/Unix workstation and server business. This, explain HP sources, is why HP has been an ardent and patient supported of Intel's Itanium chip.

The zx1 chipset includes three chips. The zx1 memory and I/O controller connects to the processor bus and includes the memory and I/O cache controller circuits. The zx1 I/O adapter chip is a single I/O adapter that supports PCI and PCI-X I/O as well as the AGP-4X graphics adapter standard from Intel (AGP-8X support will be released in a future version of the Pluto chipset). An auxiliary memory expander chip can be used to increase memory bandwidth and capacity beyond that provided with the core chip logic. The zx1 chipset supports Double Data Rate (DDR) SDRAM memory sticks (266 MHz) with capacities of 1 GB apiece today, and will support 2 GB sticks in the near future. Up to 48 memory sticks can be configured to a single chipset, yielding a maximum capacity of 96 GB of main memory. Such large memories will be necessary to balance the power of the McKinley chips, particularly on database, application, and scientific workloads.

For the moment, HP plans to keep the Pluto chipset all to itself--at least for now. If the HP-Compaq merger goes through, there will probably be ProLiant machines using the chipset as well. And, because Pluto supports the future PA-RISC 8800 and 8900 series of chips, the Pluto chipset will show up in the HP 9000 Unix server lines as well. Developing the Pluto chipset will not preclude the company from using Intel's forthcoming i870 chipset for the Itanium chips. HP will use a mix of chipsets to address different parts of the workstation and server markets.