RP4440 upgrade to 1Ghz Processors

[Dane Van Steenwyk]

I have an rp4440 that we bought with one dual PA8900 800Mhz processor. We want to use a dual 1000Mhz PA8800 processor in it but when I turn it on it comes up to the Main Menu with:

Incompatible mix of processors. System will not boot.

Is this because we can't use these PA8800's in a PA8900 system??

If i remember right I once put PA8900's in a PA8800 system and no problems but once I went back to the PA8800 it said incompatible mix.

Is there a way to get it back to working with the PA8800's??

Any Ideas??

[Torsten.]

Hi Dane,

why you have always the same problems?
How about your L-classes? Are they working now?

Have a look at this page, it shows all supported cpus:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12034_div/12034_div.HTML

Remember, you cannot mix them.

[Dane Van Steenwyk]

It looks like I have the same problems cuz HP doesn't know how to make this. Nowhere in any of the books does it say anything about using PA8800's in PA8900 system.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

The rp4440 supports both PA8800 and PA8900 CPUs.

It doesn't support a mix of processors at the same time. That means that all processors in the system are:

all PA8800 800MHz

or

all PA8800 1GHz

or

all PA8900 800MHz

or

all PA8900 1GHz

If you are trying to mix processor versions or speeds that isn't going to work.

If all the processors are the same type/speed it should work - contact your HP support to find out why its not - maybe a firmware issue?

HTH

Duncan

[Ted Buis]

The PA-RISC systems cannont mix different speed processors or types in the same hardware partition. Since the rp4440 is a single hardware partition machine, they cannot work in the same unit. The pa8800 has 32MB L2 cache and the pa8900 has 64MB L2 cache per physical chip. Since pa-risc can manage the cache explicitly, HP-UX likely has to know the cache size. You may have been lucky in putting the pa-8900 into a pa8800 system since it has a larger cache, but this is definitely not supported and a future firmware release might do a better job of checking. It should be no surprise that a pa8900 HP-UX system would die if you add a processor with a smaller cache than what it expects, even if it were to make it past the firmware checks.

[Andrew Rutter]

dane,

it seems you may have one of the slightly older boxes with an early version of firmware installed. when they where first released the pa8800 was the latest processor so no support was added for pa8900 proc.

Since they were released a new firmware release became available

Here is the link

http://www4.itrc.hp.com/service/patch/patchDetail.do?BC=patch.breadcrumb.main|patch.breadcrumb.search|&patchid=PHSS_33088&context=firmware:osinit

download this and insatll and hopefully you will be up and running with the pa8900's

Also just a quick note as others have said about mixing them. The rp4440's can have upto 4 dual core proc's so make sure you dont have any installed on the other side of the processor extender board, I'm sure you checked already but there are quite well hidden

Andy

[Dane Van Steenwyk]

Thanks for the input guys. I just wanted to make it clear though that I only have one processor installed in the system. What I meant by it was a PA8900 system is that it had PA8900's in it before we bought it but we bought it with no processors then wanted to add the PA8800 proc by itself. And that is what isn't working.

My firmware is 45.11 so I don't know if that is the latest.

Also, when I do an IN CA for the cache sizes it gives me 33554432 for Insructional cache size and 33554432 for Data cache size. Shouldn't this be something like 64MB or 32MB??

Any help would be much appreciated.

[Ted Buis]

Thank you for the clarification. There is probably something in NVRAM or firmware that is making it look for the pa8900 processors. If you interrupt the boot process, you could look for a way to change it, but it might require tools that an HP CE would only have. I won't be able to get my hands on an rp4440 until sometime next week at the earliest. HP probably has an upgrade process for going from a pa8800 to a pa8900. You may try to look for documentation for it at www.docs.hp.com and see if they outline a fall back processes in case the upgrade fails. But those pages, if they exist, might be restricted to authorized service providers.

[Dane Van Steenwyk]

I'm gonna give HPINVENT a call and see what they can do. I'll post what I find out.

[timmy b. · Accepted solution]

45.11 is current.

33554432 = 33,554,432 = 32mb

The upgrade from 8800 to 8900 (32mb to 64mb) requires an upgrade to the core I/O as well as the CPU replacement. This means replacing the U160 SCSI and single port LAN cards with U320 SCSI and dual port LAN card. While the dual port LAN was an option on the original units, perhaps the 8800 architecture is not compatible with the newer SCSI cards.

Most customers aren't worried about back revving their hardware, hence most documentation is written with a methodology of "upgrade" and not "downgrade". You can find my reference for the information listed above in Chapter 2 of http://tinyurl.com/7nt33