HP Sets zx2 'Titan' Chipset for Entry Integrity Machines

Published: March 23, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While Hewlett-Packard has been talking up its high-end "Arches" chipset for big Integrity servers this week, the company hasn't forgotten about the entry server market and is planning a baby version of this chipset aimed at the low end of the market.

In the past, when workstation volumes helped RISC/Unix vendors spread out the cost of designing and manufacturing their products across a higher volume of machines than they could have done with their servers alone, having a decent workstation and entry server chipset was crucial. That's why HP spent money developing the "Pluto" zx1 chipset for the "McKinley" and "Madison" variants of the single-core Itanium processors as well as its own dual-core PA-8800 processors. The Pluto chipset was, of course, supposed to support a HP Unix, Windows, and Linux workstation line, but in September 2004, HP killed off the Itanium workstation line, leaving HP-UX workstation customers in a bit of a lurch. HP is still selling PA-RISC workstations running its Unix variant, and sells very fast Linux and Windows workstations using Xeon and Opteron processors, of course.

In any event, the future "Titan" zx2 chipset, which I told you about last April, will support the dual-core "Montecito" Itanium processors as well as the dual-core PA-8900 processors designed by HP. While HP has not said specifically about when the Titan chipset will be delivered, the odds favor an announcement concurrent with Intel's Montecito launch in the middle of the year. The chipset almost certainly will not end up in workstations--although, a baby rx Series Integrity server running HP-UX and sporting a high-end PCI-Express graphics card is, in effect, a workstation--it will be used in entry rack and tower servers with two and possibly four sockets, and very likely in blade servers as well. HP has not provided any guidance on what performance gains the Titan chipset would have over its Pluto predecessor, but it would not be surprising to see it deliver a 25 to 30 percent performance boost all by itself because of memory and bandwidth increases.

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