Why can PA-8700+ processors be mixed with Itanium 2 9M processors?
For years, HP has had a high level of investment protection with the HP 9000 Superdome. Customers have been provided with the maximum investment protection level by keeping their investment in PA8600 and PA8700 processors while adding the higher speed PA8700+. In addition, each processor type runs at its rated speed so there is no downgrading of the higher speed processors (some competitors are erroneously saying Superdome has to downgrade the higher speed processors). For example, the PA8700 runs at a full 750 MHz while the PA8600 runs at 550 MHz-there is no forcing of the PA8700 down to 550 MHz just to obtain compatibility. This is possible because the processor speeds are independent from the bus speeds. The Intel Itanium 2 processor family is an advanced architecture featuring exceptional floating point and SSL performance. The Itanium 2 processors have the processing power that is consistent with a Superdome class high-end server. In addition, the Itanium processor accesses cache
