HP's new Alpha Marvels revealed

On no account should we involve Dietrich in details of the GS1280 - the high end HP server that will be available in eight way and 16 way systems, and which apparently will allow two processor partitions that can run different applications and separate operating systems.

Like, say, you combined OpenVMS and Tru64 clusters for downtime that may never come. Later this year, said Dietrich, we are likely to see 32-64 way GS1280s. Right now the systems will support 8 to 64GB.

SPECint_2000 marks of 875 or so, that's not bad, and 1,500 SPECfp_2000s. And some pretty sizzling reliability features including auto server recovery, RAID memory, hot swapping server management LAN components and redundo hot swap power fans. Sheesh! What a Marvel.

These ES47 AlphaServers which use the EV7 Alphas aren't bad either, with HP likely to offer 2 CPU towers and 2-4 way racks. A system on a chip (SOC) feature gives built in symmetric multiprocessing, and they'll support Linux, Tru64 and OpenVMS too. The 1GHz EV7s will support up to eight/16GB memory, and seem to be exhibiting SPECint_2000 marks of 763 and SPECfp_2000 marks of 1,290.

And as for the cunning ES80 systems, well Dietrich reckons they'll be out in March, again using 1GHz EV7s and will offer two, four, six or eight CPU support, with bencmakrs similar to the above, for obvious reasons.

No wonder Mike Capellas ceded this Alpha technology to Intel - it's surely good stuff.

The AlphaServers use Rambus memory -- see here, and as we predicted in this November 2001 article, here. µ

* MEANWHILE, some Alpha SAP benchmarks that got HP's knicks in a bit of a twist have mysteriously disappeared off its web site with the puzzling message: "we're very sorry! The page you requested can not be found".

See Also
HP's Marvel AlphaServers ready to roll...