GOVERNMENT

PALO ALTO, CA -- Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HWP) today unveiled the HP scalable processor chipset zx1 for HP's McKinley-based workstations and servers at the Intel Developers Forum. The chipset enables HP to offer cost-effective workstations and servers that run applications fast and reliably by taking advantage of the performance of the Intel® Itanium(TM) processor family as it moves to its next generation. HP's design team was challenged to engineer a way to squeeze the most performance out of a limited number of McKinley CPU processors while balancing cost and systems design flexibility. The result is the HP zx1, a chipset that provides customers with a cost-effective, high bandwidth and low latency solution for 1- to 4-way workstations and servers. Today's announcement extends HP's strategy to lead the Itanium market with high-performance, cost-effective systems running top applications on Microsoft® Windows®, Linux and HP-UX operating environments. ``Because HP co-developed the Itanium architecture with Intel, our engineers have intimate knowledge of the processor,'' said Barry Crume, business product manager for Itanium workstations, HP Technical Computing Division. ``Using our expertise with multiple operating systems and technical and business applications, we then whittled away the unessential to deliver a chipset that is as lean and powerful as a finely tuned race car.'' HP leveraged its technical relationship with Agilent Technologies to implement the physical design of the chipset. Agilent provided application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips in a 0.18um, low-voltage CMOS process that included custom AGP-4X, PCI-X and processor pads, as well as custom datapath logic. The three-chip solution consists of the HP zx1 memory and input/output (I/O) controller, the HP zx1 I/O adapter and an optional HP zx1 scalable memory expander. ``HP's chipset plans are a terrific example of the innovation, excitement and potential around the Itanium processor family and forthcoming McKinley,'' said Mike Graf, product marketing manager, Intel Itanium processor family. ``HP is focusing the chipset efforts on technical workstations and lower-end servers, which, along with other innovative products and technologies, should help expand McKinley's target markets and IT adoption.'' The HP zx1 memory and I/O controller interfaces to the McKinley processor bus and provides a low-latency connection to DDR memory either directly or through HP zx1 scalable memory expanders. The HP zx1 I/O adapter chip supports PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus architectures. It provides scalable I/O implementation for a wide variety of systems. The optional HP zx1 scalable memory expander quadruples main memory capacity and increases bandwidth to main memory to 12.8 GBs. The HP zx1 processor chipset features an optimized DDR interface that provides the low latency and high bandwidth to memory required by the next generation of Intel Itanium processor family CPUs. More information on the HP scalable processor chipset zx1 is available at http://www.hp.com/go/itanium