INDUSTRY

PALO ALTO, CA -- HP (NYSE:HPQ) today announced record-breaking performance results on new HP servers and workstations featuring the Intel® Itanium® 2 processor. The HP systems provide outstanding price/performance and enable customers to cost-effectively handle their most demanding enterprise workloads in HP-UX, Microsoft® Windows® and Linux environments. "HP is, once again, at the forefront of new computing technologies, providing solutions to our customers that meet the changing needs of their businesses," said Mark Hudson, worldwide marketing manager, HP Business Critical Systems. "The combination of the Intel Itanium 2 processor, HP's zx1 chipset and HP workstation and server systems enables customers to power the most complex technical and commercial business-critical applications." Enabled by the Intel Itanium 2 processor and the high-bandwidth, low-latency HP Chipset zx1, HP's servers and workstations achieved the following benchmark results: Enterprise resource planning: The HP Server rx5670 produced the world's best four-way system performance result on the SAP R/3 Sales and Distribution 2-tier benchmark, supporting 470 SD benchmark users at an average response time of 1.82 seconds with a total throughput of 141,254 dialog steps per hour. The result was achieved using the beta version of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) and Microsoft Windows Advanced Server Limited Edition version 1.2, run by HP and Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. The HP Server rx5670 was configured with four Intel Itanium 2 processors (each with 3 MB of integrated L3 cache), 16 GB of memory and 102 GB of total disk space. Database server: The HP Server rx2600 and HP Server rx5670 reported top two-way and four-way online transaction processing database performance with the TPC-C benchmark using Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) and Microsoft Windows Advanced Server Limited Edition version 1.2. The four-way HP Server rx5670 reported 78,455 tpmC (transactions per minute) at $5.12/tpmC, outpacing all competitive four-way servers. The slim 2U two-way HP Server rx2600 reported 40,621 tpmC at $5.72/tpmC. Secure Web serving capacity: The HP Server rx5670 delivered a No. 1 SPECweb99_SSL benchmark result of 1,520 -- 2.7 times more powerful than a comparable Sun Fire V480 configured with four 900 MHz UltraSPARC III Cu CPUs each with 8 MB L2 cache. The HP Server rx5670 also performed at a rate 1.4 times faster than the IBM Power4-based eServer P630 system at 1.0 GHz. High-performance scientific and technical computing: On the Linpack n=1000 benchmark, the HP Server rx5670 with an Intel Itanium 2 processor at 1 GHz reported a score 22 percent higher than the IBM eServer pSeries 690 with a Power4 processor at 1.3 GHz. The HP workstations and servers produced in excess of 3.5 billion floating point operations per second. Computer-aided engineering: CPU for CPU, the HP Workstation zx6000 and HP Server rx2600 outperformed IBM's flagship 1.3 GHz Power4 systems on three out of four of MSC's Nastran performance benchmarks. Floating point engine: The HP Workstation zx6000 achieved the world's fastest SPECfpbase_2000 result of 1,356. This score for the HP workstation is 13 percent higher than IBM's most powerful CPU, the Power4 at 1.3 GHz, with a SPECfp_base2000 score of 1,202. The HP workstation is also 1.9 times faster than the Sun Blade 2000 (UltraSPARC III 1050 MHz copper), with a SPECfp_base2000 score of 701. Commercial compute core: Itanium 2-based systems from HP with the HP Chipset zx1 outperformed the best from IBM and Sun. HP achieved a SPECintbase_2000 score of 810 and 807 on an HP Server rx2600 and HP Workstation zx6000, respectively.