Mid-range and high-end PA-RISC computer systems

A performance upgrade to the successful Hewlett-Packard K-series products has been designed. The new product uses the PA-8000 processor and the "Hawks" hardware platform to provide a high performance mid-range server system. The system uses parallel memory and IO systems in order to efficiently utilize the processing power provided by the PA-8000 processor. The superscalar speculative and out of order execution capabilities of the PA-8000, coupled with Symmetric multi-processor (SMP) dictates the need for the parallelism designed into the system. At the same time, it is important to ensure a cost effective system design. Described in this paper is the architecture of the new Mohawk product within the Hawks family of products.