Hewlett-Packard Announces EISA-Bused 486 System
 
Microbytes Daily News Service
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Hewlett-Packard officially introduced its new Vectra 486 deskside
computer today, making it the first company to announce a system
that uses the Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA). The
Vectra 486 will be priced between $13,999 and $19,999 and will be
available early next year, HP officials told BYTE.
 
BYTE editor Nick Baran got an early look at this new Vectra 486.
Here's a detailed report, based on an article that will appear
in the November BYTE. --Tony Lockwood
 
 
HP's New Vectra 486: First to Ride EISA Bus
With its new 80486-based computer announced today, HP becomes the
first of the "Gang of Nine" to offer a system with an EISA bus.
 
Since Hewlett-Packard's unsuccessful attempt at leadership in
the PC market with its touchscreen HP-150 back in 1983, the
company has settled for being more of a follower than a leader,
building solid, reliable IBM PC clones and leaning heavily on
its entrenched positions in the minicomputer and electronic
equipment markets. But HP has embarked on a new strategy of
product innovation and market leadership.
 
On the software side, HP has taken the lead in developing the
Unix-based Motif user interface for the Open Software
Foundation and has recently begun shipping its innovative
NewWave user environment for Microsoft Windows.
 
On the hardware side, the first evidence of HP's new strategy
is its new Vectra 486 PC, a powerful 80486-based deskside
system that is the first machine on the market to feature the
long-awaited EISA bus. HP gave us an early look at a preliminary
version of the new Vectra 486, and it is indeed an impressive
machine, offering both excellent performance and broad
flexibility. The Vectra 486 is equally well-suited for use as a
high-performance CAD workstation or as a network server or as a
host for a multiuser system. And, as you might expect, it can run
Unix, DOS, or OS/2.
 
From the outside, the Vectra 486 looks identical to the Vectra
RS/20C and RS/25C (these are the 80386 deskside models of the
Vectra series). The floor-standing, 24-inch-high system cabinet
weighs in at a hefty 60 pounds and includes six half-height
storage bays, allowing up to two full-height hard disks and four
floppy and/or tape backup storage devices to be installed in
the system. The system is powered by a 360-watt power supply. The
Vectra 486 comes standard with 2 megabytes of RAM, one
5.25-inch 1.2-megabyte floppy drive, two serial ports, one
parallel port, and PS/2-type, mini-DIN keyboard and mouse ports.
 
It's the inside of the Vectra 486 that sets it apart from other
members of the Vectra family. The main components of the Vectra
486 system are the 80486 central processing unit, an 8-slot
EISA bus, and a special high-speed bus which drives the system
memory and a high-performance "SuperVGA" video controller.
 
 
The 80486 CPU
The heart of the Vectra 486 is Intel's new 80486 CPU, which
features on-chip floating-point and memory management units, as
well as an internal 8K byte cache (for an overview of the
80486, see BYTE, June 1989, page 13). Unlike some of the other
recently announced 80486 machines, such as those from Apricot
and ALR, the Vectra 486 does not include an external cache, but
relies entirely on the 8K internal cache of the 80486.
 
According to HP's research and development manager for the
Vectra 486, Rich Archuleta, the internal 8K cache "gave us the
best cost/performance tradeoff on a 25-MHz system." Archuleta
added that a "pretty big" external cache is necessary to obtain
a significant gain in performance.
 
It should also be mentioned that the system board does not
include a socket for an auxiliary floating-point coprocessor
such as the Weitek 4167 (see BYTE, July 1989, page 26). The
Weitek chip is reportedly much faster than the floating-point
unit built in to the 80486, but according to Archuleta, the
system board was already in its final design stages when Weitek
announced the 4167. HP will, however, support the 4167 in a
later version of the system board.
 
 
The High Performance Host Bus
The new system's EISA bus may grab all the attention, but also
of note is the Vectra 486's custom, 32-bit "high-performance
system bus" or "host bus." This bus is used to access system
memory as well as HP's SuperVGA video controller. The host bus
operates synchronously at the clock speed of the CPU, allowing
a theoretical data transfer bandwidth of 100 megabytes per second
(25 MHz or million cycles per second multiplied by 4 bytes per
cycle).
 
Of course, the actual bandwidth is limited by transfer protocols,
CPU resets and interrupts, and other performance penalties. But
HP claims that the host bus can access system memory with a
bandwidth of 50 megabytes per second using the "burst mode" of
the 80486. System memory is available in 80-nanosecond, 1-megabit
single in-line memory modules (SIMMs), allowing a maximum of
16 megabytes bytes of RAM, or in 4-megabit SIMMs, allowing a
maximum of 64 megabytes of RAM.
 
 
HP's New VGA Controller
As mentioned earlier, the Vectra 486's host bus supports
high-speed access to HP's new SuperVGA video controller. The
video controller plugs directly into the host bus but also takes
up one EISA bus slot (the board extends across one of the EISA
slots).
 
The new VGA adapter is actually a "superset" of the VGA standard,
supporting resolutions of 800 by 600 pixels, 1024 by 768 pixels,
as well as the standard VGA resolution of 640 by 480 pixels. The
controller displays 8 bits per pixel for a maximum of 256
simultaneous colors (16 colors in 1024 by 768 mode) and includes
512K bytes of video RAM.
 
I did not have a chance to see the new video controller, since it
was still in production at the time of this writing. However,
HP's Archuleta told us that it would offer about 10 times the
performance of a standard VGA controller. The machine I saw used
a standard, 16-bit, AT-type VGA board plugged into the EISA bus.
 
Before moving on to other features of the Vectra 486, it is worth
noting that the high-speed host bus is a critical component of
the system, particularly because of its high-performance graphics
capabilities. Unlike the EISA bus or other I/O buses, for that
matter, HP's host bus offers a much faster and efficient path to
the CPU, since it does not have to bother with bus arbitration
protocols and other performance penalties associated with bus
I/O. Therefore, the system can support much higher block-transfer
rates from system and video memory. In high-resolution graphics
systems, high-speed block transfers are extremely important for
ensuring adequate performance (consider the amount of data that
must be transfered to refresh a screen displaying a 1024- by
768-pixel CAD model, for example).
 
The Vectra 486 designers claim that the host bus will be able
to support sustained block-transfer rates of 25 megabytes per
second, a performance figure in the class of the graphics engine
used in Sun's SPARCStation. In addition, since the host bus is
32 bits wide, we can expect to see high-performance color boards
and 3-D accelerators offered as options instead of the VGA video
controller.
 
 
The EISA Bus
And then there's the EISA bus. As mentioned earlier, the Vectra
486 includes 8 EISA slots which use the double-row EISA
connector, allowing both AT-type (Industry Standard
Architecture or ISA) and EISA-type adapter cards to be plugged
into the bus. Unfortunately, there were no EISA-type cards
installed in the system that I saw. At this point, the EISA bus
is in its infancy and there are still no add-in cards available
that use the performance features of the EISA bus. Suffice it to
say, then, that the Vectra 486 does indeed have an EISA bus and
that there will be 32-bit EISA cards available for it within the
next year. According to HP's product manager, Steve Keilen, HP
will offer a high-performance EISA hard-disk controller board
within the next year. And several network vendors are working on
Ethernet and other network controllers for the EISA bus.
 
 
Mass Storage
The Vectra 486 will be offered with a wide variety of
mass-storage options. HP is offering a line of hard disks ranging
from 108 to 670 megabytes. The 330- and 670-megabyte hard disks
are brand new and are manufactured by HP. Most of these hard
disks are available with embedded ESDI controllers that plug
directly into the Vectra 486 system board, saving a bus slot.
However, an ESDI controller card (AT-type) is also available
for running additional hard disks. The ESDI hard disk
controller features a data-transfer rate of 20 megabits per
second. The hard disks offer an average access time of about 16
milliseconds.
 
The Vectra 486 system board also includes a built-in floppy- and
tape-drive controller, which can support up to four tape or
floppy drives. The controller supports 5.25- and 3.5-inch drive
formats including the HP-150's 710K format.
 
 
Performance
I had an opportunity to run BYTE's system-level benchmarks for
80286 machines on a Vectra 486, equipped with 4 megabytes of
RAM, the 330-megabyte hard disk, and a standard 16-bit VGA board.
The results are shown in table 1 at the end of this article. I
must emphasize that the machine I tested was a pre-production
model using an early version of the 80486 CPU and a beta
version of HP's new hard disk. According to Rich Archuleta, the
performance of the 80486 should improve substantially in its
final production version. He also said that HP's hard disks
will run faster in the final version. And, as mentioned
earlier, I was unable to test the new high-speed VGA controller
that will ship with the production version of the machine.
 
In any case, the Vectra 486 yielded results comparable to those
of other 486 systems we have tested. The CPU index is somewhat
lower than the number for the Apricot or ALR systems because
the Vectra does not include an external cache. But the Vectra
is also faster than IBM's 486 Power Platform.
 
The hard disk and video numbers were among the fastest of the
80486 systems we've tested so far. And the video test does not
reflect the performance of the high-performance video
controller.
 
 
A High-End System for High-End Applications
HP officials said the new systems will be priced between
$13,999 and $19,999 and will be available early next year. It's
probably clear by now that the Vectra 486 is aimed at the high
end of the personal computer market and is actually capable of
replacing much higher priced minicomputers as a network server
or multiuser host. The 32-bit EISA bus opens up possibilities
for high-performance network and hard-disk controllers that
would make the Vectra 486 ideal for multiuser and network
environments. The high-speed host bus and the new VGA controller
make the machine an excellent choice as a high-performance CAD
and engineering workstation.
 
But in spite of its promise, the Vectra 486 is a little ahead
of its time. Intel is still testing its 80486 for bugs and
there are few, if any, third-party EISA-bus adapter cards
available right now. In my estimation, it won't be until the
middle of 1990 before the 486 and EISA are fully operational
with a good base of third-party support. But Hewlett-Packard is
to be congratulated for taking a bold step with its new Vectra
486. With HP's reputation for reliability and strong customer
support, the Vectra 486 is sure to be one of the strongest
competitors in the Intel-based workstation and high-end PC
markets.
 
 
Table 1: Benchmark results for the new HP EISA system
According to early results with BYTE Lab's Low-Level Benchmark
tests, the new HP Vectra 486 system's best strength appears to
be its disk performance.
 
 
System                  CPU     FPU   Disk  Video
                                       I/O
 
HP Vectra 486 PC        6.03   21.6    3.4   4.46
Apricot VX FT Server    6.7    21.8    2.3   5.2
IBM Power Platform 486  5.3    21.4    1.8   4.3
 
 
Note: Indexes show relative performance. For all indexes, an
8-MHz IBM PC AT = 1. For a full description of all the
benchmarks, see "Introducing the New BYTE Benchmarks," June
1988 BYTE.
 
 
Contact
Hewlett-Packard, 19091 Prune Ridge Ave, Cupertino, CA
95014; (408) 725-8900.
 
 
                              --- Nick Baran
 
Nick Baran is the BYTE bureau chief in San Francisco, where he
also writes for BYTEWEEK and Microbytes. He can be reached on
BIX as "nickbaran."
 
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