News release

HP ProLiant Servers Set Price/Performance Milestone - First Ever to Break $2 Transaction per Minute Ratio

Record TPC-C benchmark result outshines competing solutions from Dell, IBM

HP (NYSE:HPQ) today announced that it has set a world record Transaction Processing Council TPC-C benchmark with the lowest price-to-performance ratio of $1.91 per tpmC (transactions per minute), marking the first time that a server has broken the $2.00 per tpmC barrier.⁽¹⁾ The result offers customers the greatest value and greater return on investment based on HP's innovation on industry-standard platforms.

The benchmark result, which had 17,192.40 transactions per minute, was achieved using the next-generation HP ProLiant ML350 server with one Intel® Xeon® 3.06-gigahertz processor and 512-kilobytes cache running Microsoft Windows® Server 2003 Standard Edition and SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition. The HP ProLiant ML350 price-to-performance ratio beat all competing platform results, including those from Dell and IBM.⁽²⁾

HP has a long history of offering customers value by continually lowering the price-to-performance ratio on the IA-32 platform: HP also was the first to break the $100, $25, $20, $10 and $5 per tpmC barriers, using HP ProLiant servers.

"The price/performance benchmark is one of the key metrics customers use to determine the value of a solution from a vendor," said Brad Anderson, senior vice president and general manager, Industry Standard Servers, HP. "With the combination of competitive pricing and innovative technologies, more customers choose HP ProLiant servers than any other server in the market."

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing. For the fiscal year ending on Oct. 31, 2003, HP revenue totaled $73.1 billion. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com.

⁽¹⁾ HP ProLiant ML350 17,192.40 tpmC at $1.91/tpmC, available Dec. 17, 2003. Source: Transaction Processing Council (TPC) http://www.tpc.org.

⁽²⁾ Dell PowerEdge 2650 20,108 tpmC at $2.12/tpmC, available Jan. 14, 2004; IBM eServer xSeries 235 31,910 tpmC at $2.15/tpmC, available Dec. 3, 2003. Source: Transaction Processing Council (TPC) http://www.tpc.org.

Microsoft and Windows are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corp. Intel is a registered trademark and Xeon is a trademark of Intel Corp. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. TPC is a registered trademark of the Transaction Processing Performance Council.