HP VECTRA XW User manual

HP Vectra XW
Guide to Optimizing
Performance

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Guide to Optimizing
Performance
A guide to the performance benefits of your HP Vectra XW Personal
Workstation.

iv English
The Performance Benefits of Your HP Vectra XW
Your Hewlett-Packard Personal Workstation makes use of a number of
features to provide you with the highest performance. The
configuration of your Personal Workstation has been optimized by HP
to make the best use of these features for 3D graphics and animation
applications.
The performance of your Personal Workstation will depend on the
applications you use. For example, different software applications
require different amounts of memory and will produce files of different
sizes. Best performance is obtained by balancing your system’s
configuration with the requirements of your software.
To provide versatility in your system’s configuration, Hewlett-Packard
offers a number of performance-enhancing accessories. Some of these
are upgrades that allow you to increase the performance of your
Personal Workstation in one particular area. Other accessories add to
your system’s existing capabilities.
This guide describes the high-performance features of your Personal
Workstation and how you can obtain maximum benefit from them. This
will help you to optimize the performance of your HP Vectra XW for
your specific use.
This guide is presented in two chapters:
•Your Personal Workstation’s performance features
Describes the new features used by your system, with suggestions on
how to optimize their performance.
•Technical reference
Gives general technical reference information, with emphasis on the
new features used by the HP Vectra XW Personal Workstation.
NOTE The Pentium™Pro processor installed in your system provides the best
performance when used with 32-bit applications.

Contents
English v
1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Your Personal Workstation’s Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Performance Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Your System’s Processor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Advantages of Dual Processor Configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Matching Memory Capacity to Your Requirements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Benefits of 32-bit Applications. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Installing Fast Peripherals on the PCI Bus. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Increasing the Speed Limit With Ultra SCSI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Disk Striping. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Making the Most of Your System’s IDE Channels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
More 3D Graphics Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3D Graphic Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3D Graphics Adapter Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
OpenGL Acceleration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Your System’s Audio Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
HP PCI Integrated 10/100BT LAN Interface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Performance Topic/Configuration Cross-Reference. . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

vi English
2 Technical Reference
Architectural Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
The Intel Pentium Pro Processor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Characteristics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Superpipeline Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Integrated Cache Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Higher Clock Speeds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
The Pentium Pro Local Bus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Main Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Data Integrity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Memory Upgrade Path . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Technical Characteristics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

1
Your Personal Workstation’s
Performance Features
This chapter describes the new features of your HP Vectra XW
Personal Workstation and how these features can bring optimized
performance to your 3D graphics or animation application.

1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Overview
2English
Overview
Your HP Vectra XW Personal Workstation provides a number of
features that bring unprecedented levels of performance to your
desktop applications. Some of these features offer you their full
performance benefits immediately, without needing to be adjusted in
any way. Other features must be configured according to your use
before their full benefit can be realized.
This chapter explains these new features so that you can better
understand the performance benefits they offer. Where a feature is
configurable or can be upgraded, detailed descriptions are given to
help you understand the options available to you.
The following features of your Personal Workstation are described in
this chapter:
•Intel Pentium™Pro processor
•Dual processing capability
•Flexible memory configuration
•Advanced operating system support
•PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus
•Support for Ultra SCSI devices
•High performance IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) mass storage
•Advanced 3D graphics capabilities
•High quality, stereo audio recording and playback
•Fast and adaptable networking.

English 3
1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Overview
Your Personal Workstation’s Configuration
The configuration of your Personal Workstation has been optimized by
HP for general use. However, the performance of your system can be
further improved by changing this configuration to match the
requirements of your applications.
You can change the configuration of your Personal Workstation in three
ways:
❒Adjust the parameters of the existing configuration through the
BIOS Setup program
❒Install accessories
❒Change the configuration parameters of your software to make the
best use of your system’s features.
NOTE The Pentium Pro processor installed in your system provides the best
performance when used with Windows NT and 32-bit applications.
Performance Topics
The following topics are covered in this chapter:
❒Your System’s processor
❒Advantages of dual processor configurations
❒Matching memory capacity to your requirements
❒Benefits of 32-bit applications
❒Installing fast peripherals on the PCI bus
❒Increasing the speed limit with Ultra SCSI
❒Making the most of your IDE channels
❒More 3D graphics performance
❒Your System’s audio resources
❒HP PCI integrated 10/100BT LAN interface.

1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Your System’s Processor
4English
Your System’s Processor
The key to the power of your HP Vectra XW is the high-performance
processor its uses: the Intel Pentium Pro. The capabilities of this
processor are sufficient to handle any 3D-graphic or multi-media
application you may use.
The Processor’s Clocks Everything your system’s processor does is synchronized to a regular
pulse known as the processor clock. The speed of this clock defines the
speed at which your processor performs its work.
The 200 MHz Pentium Pro processor uses a system board clock source
of 66 MHz. All operations on the local bus (such as data transfers with
memory) are synchronized to this clock. Other devices in the system
also use this clock to generate their own clock signals; for example, the
Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus controller divides this
clock in half to produce the 33 MHz PCI clock.
For its own internal operation, the Pentium Pro processor multiplies
the clock source to obtain a faster, internal clock. It is the frequency of
this internal clock that defines your processor’s speed. The 200 MHz
processor in your Vectra XW uses the 66 MHz clock source and
multiplies this by 3 to produce its own 200 MHz internal clock.
PCI bus - 33 MHz Processor’s local bus - 66 MHz
Pentium Pro processor - 200 MHz

English 5
1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Your System’s Processor
NOTE The Pentium Pro processor installed in your system provides the best
performance when used with Windows NT and 32-bit applications.
Inside the Processor Internally, your system’s processor performs tasks by breaking them
down into sub tasks. Each of these sub tasks requires a number of clock
cycles to complete.
The Pentium Pro processor integrates some functions that were
performed by external components in previous generations of Personal
Workstations; level-two cache memory is an example of one of these
functions. This means that the Pentium Pro processor can perform a
significant proportion of its work internally, without needing to access
other system components through the local bus.
By using a faster clock for internal operations than for external (local
bus) operations, the Pentium Pro processor accelerates the work it
performs internally. Since internal operations represent much of the
processor’s total activity, the effect of this acceleration is a significant
improvement in overall processor performance.
Processor’s local bus
The Pentium Pro
processor performs much
of its work internally

1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Advantages of Dual Processor Configurations
6English
Advantages of Dual Processor Configurations
Your Personal Workstation is supplied with one or two 200 MHz
Pentium Pro processors installed. If you have a single-processor model,
you will also have a socket on the System board for installing a second
200 MHz Pentium Pro processor.
Two Processors Are
Better Than One
Your HP Vectra XW Personal Workstation is fully compliant with the
Intel Multiprocessor Specification (MPS) for dual processing. This
standard defines how multiple processors work with a single set of
system memory and I/O resources.
The HP Vectra XW supports symmetric multiprocessing, which means
that each processor can perform any task. Symmetric multiprocessors
appear to the user as a single, more powerful processor.
If you have a single-processor Vectra XW, installing a second Pentium
Pro processor will yield a significant performance advantage. The
second processor works alongside the first and shares the processing
workload. This can increase the overall processing performance of your
system by up to 80%, depending on your application.
Processor’s local bus

English 7
1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Advantages of Dual Processor Configurations
Multithreaded
Operating Systems
Any operating system consists of a number of functions, each of which
controls some small part of the system’s operation. Application software
uses these functions as building blocks to create specific, more powerful
tools for the user.
Under a single-threaded operating system no individual function is
independent. All operating system work (including any work
performed by an application) consists of a single, inseparable thread of
functions and so must be performed by the same processor.
Multithreaded operating systems, like Windows NT, use functions that
are effectively independent. This allows the operating system to break
its work into separate threads of functions. Since the threads are
effectively independent, they can be followed by different processors.
Single-threaded operating system
Multithreaded operating system
F1 - F12 are
operating system
functions

1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Advantages of Dual Processor Configurations
8English
MPS-Ready
Operating Systems
Windows NT is an MPS-ready operating system. An MPS-ready
operating system is multithreaded and also guarantees the integrity of
any data shared between the different processors. Data integrity is
essential in any environment where multiple copies of the same data can
exist —failure to guarantee this can lead to logical conflicts and
operational failure. MPS-ready operating systems protect against these
risks by ensuring that valid copies of the same data are identical.
Multiprocessor-
Efficient
Operating Systems
Windows NT is more than MPS-ready —it is also multiprocessor-
efficient. A multiprocessor-efficient operating system reduces the
length of the individual functions contained within their different
threads.
In an MPS-compliant multiprocessing computer, all processors share
the same local bus and must load the functions they perform over this
bus. By reducing the length of these functions, Windows NT ensures
that no processor is slowed while another processor loads a function
over the local bus. This guarantees that each processor is used to its
best advantage.
Multithreaded
Applications
Applications written specifically for multithreaded operating systems
are also multithreaded. These applications permit their own operation
to be performed through separate threads. Refer to the manual supplied
with your software application to determine if it is multithreaded.

English 9
1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Advantages of Dual Processor Configurations
The Advantages of Dual
Processing
Your HP Vectra XW is able to bring the advantages of multiprocessing
to your desktop. With two processors installed, the power of your
Personal Workstation is significantly increased. However, this does not
mean that your system can process individual commands and
instructions more quickly. Instead, your processing capacity is
increased, meaning that your system can process more commands and
instructions at one time.
The use you make of the second processor will be determined by the
applications you use. To illustrate this, assume you are running
Windows NT with the following applications:
❒One single-threaded application.
Both processors are able to share the operating system’s work, but
all the work for the application must still be carried out by a single
processor. The performance of your system may be faster than if you
had only one processor installed, but not by a significant factor.
❒Two or more single-threaded applications simultaneously.
Each processor will perform the work for different applications. The
performance of your system will be significantly improved by the
second processor.
❒A multithreaded application.
Both processors are able to share the work of the application. All
work is shared and so the performance will be significantly increased
with respect to a single processor configuration. Multithreaded
applications will gain the maximum benefit from the second Pentium
Pro processor in your system.
NOTE The Pentium Pro processor installed in your system provides the best
performance when used with Windows NT and 32-bit applications.

1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Advantages of Dual Processor Configurations
10 English
NOTE This distinction is important. If you use multithreaded applications or
multiple single-threaded applications, a second Pentium Pro processor
will significantly improve the performance of your system. If, however,
you run just one single-threaded application, then the second processor
will offer little, or no performance advantage.
One single-threaded application
Multiple single-threaded applications or one multithreaded application
O/S 1 and O/S 2
are multithreaded
operating system
functions
AP 1 and AP 2
are application
functions

English 11
1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Advantages of Dual Processor Configurations
Other Benefits of Dual
Processing
One of the most important functions that a processor performs is
handling interrupts. An interrupt is a request for attention or service
from another area of the system. The processor’s ability to respond to
interrupts is an essential part of your Personal Workstation’s operation.
Interrupts allow your system to respond to unexpected events.
To handle an interrupt, your processor must first suspend its current
activity. This means that your system’s operation will be slowed
temporarily while the interrupt is being handled.
With two Pentium Pro processors installed the responsibility of
handling interrupts is shared between them. When an interrupt
request is received, the two processors arbitrate between themselves
to see which processor is performing the lowest priority work. The
selected processor will be allocated to handle the interrupt, leaving the
other processor free to continue with its work.
Additional Advantages
of Dual Processing with
your HP Vectra XW
HP has proven experience in the successful design of dual processing
platforms. Previous HP Vectra systems have used the Pentium
processor to bring MPS-compliant multiprocessing to desktop
applications.
Compared with the previous generation Pentium processor, the
Pentium Pro offers an additional performance advantage when used in
dual processing configurations: an integrated 256 KB or 512 KB level-
two cache memory.
Cache memory increases the performance of any processor by making
copies of the most frequently used data and instructions available more
quickly. The Pentium Pro also provides 16 KB of integrated, level-one
cache memory.
With the Pentium processor, level-two cache memory was external to
the processor. This meant that accesses to this memory were
performed over the local bus. In dual processing configurations, this
memory was shared between the two processors.

1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Advantages of Dual Processor Configurations
12 English
The Pentium Pro integrates level-two cache memory into the same
package as the processor and is able to access this memory without
using the local bus. This feature leads to these additional performance
advantages when the Pentium Pro processor is used in dual processing
configurations:
•Because the level-two cache memory is integrated inside the
processor, it can be accessed at the speed of the processor’s internal
clock and not at the speed of the slower, local bus clock.
•Accesses to the level-two cache memory do not cause accesses over
the local bus and thus do not risk slowing the operation of the other
processor.
•Since each Pentium Pro processor integrates a level-two cache
memory, dual processing configurations provide two level-two cache
memories. This doubles the overall capacity of level-two cache
memory in your system.

English 13
1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Matching Memory Capacity to Your Requirements
Matching Memory Capacity to Your Requirements
The HP Vectra XW is supplied with 64 MB or 128 MB of memory
installed. This memory is sufficient to run any standard 3D-graphics or
multi-media application. However, under certain conditions, the
performance of your system will be improved by installing additional
memory.
Your System’s Memory
Capacity
The memory capacity of your Personal Workstation has a very important
influence on overall performance. Memory is your processor’s
workspace. If this workspace is too small, the processor’s work will be
slowed and this will affect the overall performance of your system.
Your HP Vectra XW has four banks for installing main memory. 64 MB
or 128 MB of memory is supplied as standard (two or four 32 MB
memory modules).
Your system’s memory can be upgraded through installation of
additional memory modules. The maximum memory capacity of your
Vectra XW is 512 MB. Refer to your Personal Workstation’s User’s
Guide for more information on installing memory.
The memory modules used by your system are 72-bits wide, comprising
64 bits of data and 8 bits of Error Correcting Code (ECC) data for
increased data integrity. The ECC code is generated each time data is
written to the memory and checked when the data is read from
memory. The ECC code enables automatic correction of any single-bit
data error that occurs.
Do You Have Enough
Memory?
The ideal memory capacity for your Personal Workstation is determined
by the applications you use. If you frequently use multiple applications
at one time, you will need more memory than if you use only single
applications.

1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Matching Memory Capacity to Your Requirements
14 English
If You Do Not Have
Enough Memory
If you do not have sufficient memory for the applications you are
running, your system will compensate by using hard disk space as virtual
memory. Since your processor is able to access memory approximately
200 times faster than it can access a hard disk, the negative effect on
performance is significant.
Windows NT Under Windows NT, you can use the Performance Monitor utility to
monitor your use of memory and other system resources. Among other
indications, the Performance Monitor will report any use you are making
of the Windows NT “swap file”.
The “swap file” is the virtual memory on your hard disk used by the
processor when insufficient memory is available. If the Performance
Monitor indicates that your system is making use of the swap file, then
the performance of you Personal Workstation will be improved by
adding extra memory.
Performance
Memory Capacity