John asks:
> At 07:25 AM 9/5/02 -0700, Duane Percox wrote:
> >It's called the 3000 to 9000 conversion kit, already on the
> >hp cpl (corporate price list). Currently free in any quantity...
>
> But it's only free if you're currently running PA 8700 chips??  Or am I
> mistaken?

If you have any MPE A or N class machine, HP will, for free, turn it into a
non-crippled HP-UX box without changing the hardware.  This means if you
have a current PA-8500 A-class, then you'll get a PA-8500 HP-UX A-class as a
result, and if you buy a new PA-8700 A-Class then it will convert to an
rp24xx model of PA-8700 HP-UX system, etc.

Note that since the price of the MPE boxes is about three times that of the
HP-UX boxes that you're converting to, you might be able to sell the MPE box
with it's then-rare MPE license for significantly more than it will cost you
to buy a then-current HP-UX box of even greater performance.

All current A-class and some N-class systems are "clock reduced" meaning
they have some sort of delay loop in MPE that prevents you from using all of
the CPU cycles of the (typically) 440MHz processor in the box.

So when you take MPE away and run HP-UX, this slowdown goes away and you'll
be allowed to use all of the CPU and I/O performance available from the
hardware.

This means that a "110MHz" A-class will become a "440MHz HP-UX A-class",
etc.

As a result of doing MPE to HP-UX performance comparisons it has recently
been determined that the "110MHz" numbers appear to have been made up by HP
marketing, and that these boxes actually only allow you to use about 55MHz
out of the 440MHz available, so the "good news" is that your "110MHz"
A-class MPE system will actually become about *eight* times faster in CPU
speed when turned into an uncrippled HP-UX system.

G.

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