New HP xw9300 Workstation is the company’s first to feature AMD Opteron processors with dual PCI Express graphics

SYDNEY, March 29, 2005 – HP today launched its latest high-end visualisation workstation, offering customers with intensive computing requirements, dramatically increased graphics and computing performance.

The HP xw9300 is the company’s first workstation to include AMD Opteron™ processors and support for NVIDIA Quadro® SLI™ dual PCI Express graphics. The HP xw9300 Workstation features two full performance x16 slots that will accommodate future upgrades to the latest i/o components.

Developed specifically for customers with a need for greater performance in graphic-intensive environments, such as oil and gas exploration, manufacturing, finance and digital content creation (DCC), the HP xw9300 Workstation offers a cost-effective, scalable visualisation capability.

“Our customers are looking for technologies that help them bring product to market quicker and make decisions faster,” said Ajay Sahi, market development manager, Workstations, HP Australia. “For several months, customers have been asking for increased graphics capability for engineering design, animation development and scientific exploration.”

The processing power of two AMD Opteron processors and advanced 3D graphics capabilities of dual PCI Express allow customers to visualise large data sets with greater accuracy, helping reduce risk of error and potentially limiting increased costs due to inaccuracies.

The blazing graphics performance of the HP xw9300 Workstation is made possible by the NVIDIA nForce Professional chipset enabling dual PCI Express x16 graphic slots. With dual PCI Express graphics, customers can run large models and display complex graphics with realism and speed. The HP xw9300 is the first workstation to be certified by NVIDIA to support SLI for NVIDIA Quadro.

HP workstation customers who plan to migrate to a 64-bit environment will appreciate the AMD Opteron processor, with its ability to simultaneously run 32- and 64-bit applications. The AMD Opteron processor helps produce performance gains with its unique Direct Connect Architecture that reduces memory and other system bottlenecks. It offers customers the ability for increased performance and efficiency behind demanding applications by reducing latency and memory consumption while increasing bandwidth.

The HP xw9300 Workstation is housed in the same chassis as the HP xw8200 Workstation. The chassis is intelligently designed with tool-less access for servicing, upgrading and maintenance. The HP xw9300 features a new, quiet circuitry that allows the fans to run quieter at lower speeds when the system is idle or running low-power applications. Also new are the acoustic dampening hard drive rails that minimise transmission of vibration from the hard drives to the chassis. The vibration isolation reduces system acoustics while protecting the hard drives from vibrations outside the system.

Rounding out the existing HP workstation line up with high-end performance and expandability, the top of the line HP xw9300 Workstation supports two AMD Opteron 200 series processors with the Model 246 (2.0 GHz), Model 248 (2.2 GHz), Model 250 (2.4 GHz), dual NVIDIA Quadro PCI Express x16 graphic solutions, the NVIDIA nForce Professional MCP, up to 16 gigabytes of memory, IEEE 1394 and USB 2.0 ports in the front and back, five internal hard drives for up to 1.5 terabytes of storage, and support for Windows® XP Professional, and Red Hat Linux WS3.0 (64-bit) operating systems.

About HP HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company’s offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended Jan. 31, 2005, HP revenue totaled $81.8. billion. More information about HP (NYSE, Nasdaq: HPQ) is available at www.hp.com.au.