The PA-8800 is HP’s first dual core chip, and should provide a substantial performance boost to customers using the PA-8700+ processor. HP is also rumored to be readying a uniprocessor ProLiant server based on the Prescott Pentium 4 chip.

HP’s big marketing angle in the past few years has been standardizing its server platforms on two architectures – IA-32 and Itanium from partner Intel – and may well be a theme of the upcoming announcements.

HP is also likely to discuss rumored plans to adopt the 64-bit Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices, which support both 32-bit and 64-bit X86 applications.

Analysts anticipate a shift in attention back to the company’s RISC/Unix servers, which will offer excellent performance and decent price/performance for HP-UX applications if the PA-8800 is indeed launched.

The PA-8800, code-named Mako, includes two tweaked PA-8700 cores, their integrated L1 caches, and an integrated L2 cache controller on a single chip; it also has off chip L2 cache SRAMs that are packaged in a single module.

Each core on the PA-8800 chip has a 750KB data cache and a 750KB instruction cache, yielding a total of 1.5 MB of L1 cache. With the PA-8800s, HP seems to be breaking the data and instruction caches for each core and also shrinking them somewhat.

All told, the PA-8800 will have 3 MB of L1 cache, which is still a lot of memory space for a processor. The PA-8800 will also have 32MB of L2 cache, which is being supplied by Ramtron International, which is comprised of four SRAM chips that have 10GB/sec of bandwidth. The PA-8800 processor also includes an on-chip bus interface, similar to that in the IBM Power4 chip.

The PA-8800 has a 128-bit, 400MHz (double-pumped 200MHz) bus interface that will deliver 6.4GB/sec of bandwidth into the chip. This chip will, at 300 million transistors, be the largest that any vendor has delivered. IBM’s Microelectronics Division is said to be the chip fab for the PA-8800.

Last year, sources at HP told me that the current midrange and high-end machines that used the single-core PA-8600 or PA-8700 processors would be able to plug in a dual-core PA-8800 into their existing machines.

Specifically, those sources said that the rp7410, rp8400 and Superdome would all be able to do this. By doubling the processor core count and by ramping the clock speed of the cores from 875MHz to 1GHz, such a machine should be able to do twice as much work provided memory and I/O subsystems can stay in balance. Those sources also said that the PA-8800 was due in late summer, then late 2003 or early 2004.

On the enterprise server front, HP may also announce the Hondo dual Itanium 2 modules that it announced alongside the Pinnacles chipset used in the midrange and enterprise Integrity server lines today, which support either Itanium 2 or PA-RISC processors.

This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire