Mixing Itanium and RISC chipsets

[Barry Sollitt]

Hello,

I am pretty sure of the answer but thought I would check.

Is it possible to mix PA-RISC and Itanium CPUs on different virtual partitions on the same server ?

For example have 2 hard partitions, 1 running Itanium and the other running PA-RISC.

Thank you

[Prashant (I am Back) · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I suppose Answer should be NO.

Regards,
Prashant S.

[Zygmunt Krawczyk]

Hi Barry,

currently PA-RISC and Itanium processors require different firmware on the server, so it is no possible to mix the processors.

Regards,
Zygmunt

[Barry Sollitt]

I thought it was the case, Thanks for your help.

[Cameron Rooke]

I spoke with my engineer and he says it has been done in the lab, but HP does not intend to make it available to the public. Personally, I will find it difficult and costly to migrate from PA-RISC to Itanium if they won't support such a config. I was told that if we want it bad enough and let HP know, they will then make it available. So my advice is to let HP know that we want - and more importantly - need it.

[Ted Buis]

This is not supported at this time. In theory, this could only be possible on separate hard partitions on cell based systems using the sx1000 chipsets not virtual partitions and again, it is not supported at this time. This would limit it to pa-8800 based systems. Itanium does support vPARS at all now. A more important goal should be to support mixed Itanium and pa-risc in HP-UX 11.23 ServiceGuard clusters. That would assist migration and I believe it is more feasible.