News release

HP ProLiant Servers Set a New Standard for Performance and Fault Tolerance in the Data Center

HP ProLiant Servers Combine Latest Intel Xeon Processor MP with HP Hot Plug Memory and Enterprise Management to Offer Customers Unprecedented Performance and Uptime

HP (NYSE: HPQ) today announced record-breaking SAP and TPC-C benchmarks on industry-standard HP ProLiant ML570 and ProLiant DL760 servers respectively. Both servers feature Intel Corporation's new Intel® Xeon™ processor MP at 2 GHz with Hyper-Threading technology. Coupled with HP's Advanced Memory Protection technology and enterprise management, these servers offer customers new levels of performance and availability for large database, back-end applications and server consolidation deployments.

HP, the industry's first vendor to announce support for the latest Intel Xeon processor MP code-named Gallatin, builds on our history of TPC-C world records by breaking the 100,000 tpmC threshold with an 8-processor industry-standard SMP server. In addition, the four-processor next-generation ProLiant ML570 server achieved 80 percent faster performance during the SAP® Standard Application Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark than the previous generation of 4-processor ProLiant servers(1). These new benchmark results demonstrate the continued leadership of HP ProLiant servers, which deliver increased performance and availability and provide customers with reduced downtime and the ability to drive faster and more efficient business processes.

"With HP servers, customers can quickly and easily adapt to their ever- changing environments, which enables them to increase productivity and profits," said James Mouton, vice president of platform division, HP Industry Standard Servers, HP. "Our long standing work with Intel puts us in an ideal position to deliver the most advanced industry-standard technologies to customers and to provide the price and performance required to reliably handle demanding enterprise applications."

The next-generation HP ProLiant DL760 server, scheduled for shipment in early 2003, is based on the second-generation 8-way ProFusion chipset, code-named F8. Innovating on industry-standard architectures, the next-generation ProLiant DL760 server will be the industry's first server with Hot Plug RAID Memory technology, delivering superior fault resilience and the ability to dynamically scale workloads through the ability to hot-add memory.

"The Intel Xeon processor MP with an enhanced 2 MB iL3 cache and at speeds up to 2 GHz delivers industry-leading performance and rock-solid stability for the demanding enterprise deployments," said Mike Fister, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Enterprise Platforms Group. "The combination of Intel's latest Intel Xeon processor MP and HP's Advanced Memory Protection marks a significant technology milestone in IA32 computing."

The ProLiant ML570 server achieved 435 SAP SD users with an average dialog response time of 1.94 seconds running the latest SAP Standard Application SD Benchmark, SAP R/3Ò Release 4.6C. (1) This benchmark highlights the advantages of the ProLiant ML570 architecture under compute intensive real-world application workloads. Additional information on the benchmark can be found at http://www.sap.com/benchmark.

The ProLiant DL760 server achieved 111,805.22 transactions per minute (tpmC) with a competitive price/performance of $7.97/tpmC. More information on the benchmark can be found on http://www.tpc.org.

About HP

HP is a leading global provider of products, technologies, solutions and services to consumers and businesses. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing. HP completed its merger transaction involving Compaq Computer Corp. on May 3, 2002. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com.