While Sun Microsystems gets a lot of credit for creating the RISC/Unix workstation market and its follow-on server market, it was none other than Hewlett-Packard that bet the farm on RISC/Unix back in the late 1980s to replace the CISC processors used in its HP 3000 minis to commercialize Unix and RISC for midrange server customers. And this week, the last of its home-grown RISC chips, the PA-RISC 8900, was launched.
The PA-7000s were among the first 32-bit RISC processors in the market, back in the early 1990s, and they helped establish HP as a force in the server market, particularly among midrange customers who liked HP's proprietary HP 3000 machines but who wanted to adopt Unix to get the price/performance and software portability benefits that came from open systems. In 1996, HP moved to the 64-bit PA-8000 designs, and took many of the ideas it developed in the course of creating these processors to help Intel create the Itanium processor and its EPIC instruction set. The PA-8900 has been in development for years, just in case the migration to the Itanium line of RISC-like processors did not go as smoothly as planned.