INDUSTRY

PALO ALTO, CA – Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HWP) today announced its HP Superdome server has achieved TPC-C benchmark results that far surpass competitors Sun and IBM, a leap in presence on the Top 500 Supercomputer Site list and a long list of new customer wins. The high-end UNIX® HP Superdome server's exceptional customer acceptance and demonstrably superior capabilities in enterprise and high-performance computing come on top of a price reduction also announced today. The new TPC-C benchmark of 389,434 transactions per minute (tpmC) was achieved on a 64-way PA-8700 Superdome running Oracle9i Database, with an outstanding price/performance of $21.24 per transaction. This is the best result among the top three UNIX vendors in the marketplace and showcases Superdome's superior system scalability with large 64-way systems. This result also represents the fastest Oracle®-based TPC-C result in the industry and bears testament to the superior performance and scalability of Oracle9i Database. This result is 76 percent faster and provides a 37 percent better price/performance ratio than IBM's highest published UNIX system TPC-C benchmark. Sun is not currently present in high-end TPC-C benchmarks. It also represents a 98 percent performance improvement over Superdome's original result of 197,024 tpmC in early 2001 and gives a 50 percent improvement in the price/performance ratio in the server's first year on the market. The 98 percent improvement almost doubles the commitment to performance increase that HP made to its customers during the launch of Superdome in 2000. ``We are giving our customers a winning combination of scalable performance, with lower total cost of operation and room for expansion,'' said Mark Hudson, worldwide marketing manager, HP Business Systems and Technology Organization. ``HP's single system approach with Superdome delivers a far simpler and more cost-effective solution than anything our competitors are providing. With future generations and increased numbers of processors, we plan to deliver huge performance boosts like this over the life of the Superdome product.'' HP's high-end UNIX server business continued to show strong worldwide growth in the fourth quarter of HP's fiscal year 2001 compared to its prior fourth quarter in fiscal year 2000. This marks three consecutive quarters of outstanding high-end growth despite difficult global economic conditions. Underscoring this growth, HP has won an additional 112 sites on the latest Top 500 Supercomputer Sites list, increasing its total from 41 sites in June to 153 today. HP is only seven sites short of IBM, the current leader, which dropped its number of sites held from 215 to 160. Sun dropped its sites from 89 to 30 over the same time frame. The HP Superdome server continues to bring in further customers for commercial applications, including Blue Cross Blue Shields of Georgia, Burton Snowboards, China Post, Deutsche Telekom, Dollar General, Donaldson Co., Ford Motor Company, Idexx, Kelloggs, University of Oslo, and VERITAS Software Corporation. HP also is announcing price reductions of up to 30 percent. Combined with almost double performance for Superdomes with the PA-8700 processor, this price cut offers customers outstanding value and further showcases Superdome's competitive strength in providing faster systems at a lower cost.