Hewlett-Packard is set to debut as soon as next week its first Unix servers with the last member of the company"s PA-RISC processor family, a lineage that"s being supplanted by Intel"s Itanium. The company is likely to announce June 1 that the PA-8900 processor has arrived in the HP 9000 line of Unix servers, sources familiar with the plan said. The chip is expected to run at speeds of 800MHz, 1GHz and 1.1GHz, according to one source.
HP declined to comment for this story. But one HP Web page about its top-end Superdome server said the PA-8900 will be launched May 30. The PA-8900--like the Alpha EV7z introduced last year--is the final member of an HP chip family the company is phasing out as part of a plan to simplify its high-end server products with Itanium. HP also is expected to begin bringing its NonStop line to Itanium next week. A simpler product line and the resulting expense reductions are important to HP"s efforts to dramatically cut expenses.