HP HP-2117F on ebay

Christian wrote.... Ok, this piqued my curiosity so I went to the manuals and checked. The F series consists of the 2111F and the 2117F. The 2117F has an external hardware floating point unit mounted in a rackmount chassis underneath the cpu chassis. The 2111F also has a hardware floating point unit, but it is not mounted in a external chassis. It is mounted INSIDE the normal 1000 series chassis. I'd be curious to see just how that was done! There is obviously no room for the same physical parts. Perhaps it was put in the memory cage and the cable run to the MPP port? In any case, it must have been a very different card(s) (although functionally equivalent). Aha... I just found a picture in the manual that may elucidate this. The 2111 chassis is just as tall as the 2117 chassis, but it has 5 less I/O & memory slots at the top. Methinks the space at the top is where a 2111F specific hardware floating point unit must go. So, an F series doesn't always have the external FP processor. They all do have hardware floating point processors as separate systems. Oddly enough, the 2111F doesn't have DMS as standard while the 2117F does. That accounts for the difference in instruction set counts. Jay