HP Professional AP500 Compaq Professional Workstation AP500 Key Technologies W - Page 3

WHITE PAPER (cont'd) Compaq Workstations - Key Technologies NEW COMPAQ PROFESSIONAL WORKSTATION AP500 The Compaq Professional Workstation AP500 is a powerful, industry standard workstation specifically designed for professionals using a broad range of workstation applications. Common applications for this product include mainstream CAD/CAE (AutoCAD, Mechanical Desktop, Solidworks, Pro/ENGINEER), mainstream digital content creation (PhotoShop, 3D StudioMXA), select EDA (Concept, Board Station), financial trading (Dow Jones Market, PTW), network management (Compaq Insight Manager, BMC Patrol), and software development (Microsoft® Visual Studio). Compaq Professional Workstations are backed by strong partnerships with leading ISVs to provide highly integrated and optimized solutions, which can be confidently deployed in the most demanding, business critical environments. The Compaq Professional Workstation AP500 combines powerful industry standard components, strong partnerships with leading ISVs, and traditional Compaq quality and reliability, giving users the time-to-market advantage they need to succeed. The Compaq Professional Workstation AP500 features a highly expandable tower form factor with tool-less entry for easy service and upgrades. The tower form factor, measuring 19.75 x 10 x 23.5 in/50.165 x 25.40 x 59.69 cm (HxWxD) is optimized for placement on the floor and is rack mountable with an optional rack mount kit. INTEL®PENTIUM® II The Compaq Professional Workstation AP500 uses the newest Intel Pentium II 400-MHz and 450-MHz processors, which incorporate MMX technology and 100-MHz Front Side Bus. The Front Side Bus is the processor-to-memory bus. Pentium II processors preceding the 350-MHz clock speed and Pentium Pro processors supported 66-MHz Front Side Bus. Pentium II processors with 350-MHz or higher clock speeds have now increased to 100-MHz Front Side Bus, which provides greater processor-to-memory bandwidth and faster performance. The Compaq Professional Workstation AP500, with the Pentium II processor, supports up to 1 GB of maximum memory (using four 256-MB DIMMs). Like previous Pentium II processors, the new processor ships as a single module that contains the CPU chip, the cache tag, and the L2 cache packaged in a Single Edge Connect Cartridge (SECC). The Intel Pentium II processor features 512 KB of integrated non-blocking L2 cache and a dedicated 64-bit cache bus, which improves performance by reducing average memory access time. The Pentium II processor's L2 cache scales with the processor core frequency. Higher core frequencies will require a 100-MHz Front Side Bus (FSB), which in turn will require a new chipset, memory, and system board. The faster system bus and memory will significantly increase overall PC performance. 3