HP Announces New Midrange And Low-End Workstations; New Systems Feature Additional Cache, Increased Processing Power; Ideal for Complex Electronic and Mechanical Analysis and Design Applications.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 19, 1995--Hewlett-Packard Company today announced a new midrange workstation with expanded system cache and new low-end workstations that extend performance over existing midrange and low-end HP workstations.

These new systems are targeted at HP's rapidly growing customer base in key technical markets such as electronic and mechanical design automation (EDA and MDA) and mechanical computer-aided design and engineering (MCAD and MCAE), and offer price/performance advantages in these markets over comparably configured workstations from Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics.

The new workstations include the HP 9000 Model 715/100 XC, which is targeted at power users running demanding technical applications that require additional system cache, and the HP 9000 Model 712/100, a high-performance, entry-level system that offers leading 2-D price/performance. The systems are available to current HP Model 712 and 715 customers through a simple, "no-penalty" processor-board upgrade, which requires customers to pay only the difference between customers' current and upgrade models. Customers also can purchase the new models as complete systems.

"Processing power, price/performance and application performance are at the top of our technical-market-customers' priority list, and today we are more than meeting these requirements by completely refreshing our popular Model 712 and 715 product lines," said Mark A. Canepa, general manager of HP's Workstation Systems Division. "This announcement complements our recent J-class workstation introduction, which allows HP customers to select a system that best fits their needs from the industry's most comprehensive technical-workstation family."

Model 715/100 XC offers the following:

o 1MB of shared cache designed to support applications that require additional cache memory;

o superior midrange compute performance with up to 132.2 SPECint92 and 184.6 SPECfp92. These performance levels position the Model 715/100 XC as the leading price/performance desktop in HP's midrange product line, where it is ideally suited for EDA, MDA and MCAE markets, as well as geographic information systems (GIS), medical imaging and multimedia authoring;

o support for a wide array of 3-D graphics accelerators, including HP's new VISUALIZE 8 and VISUALIZE 24, HCRX series graphics subsystems and the Freedom Series of graphics accelerators from Evans & Sutherland.

The Model 712/100 also is targeted at customers who need 2-D graphics performance for EDA and technical software-development applications. The Model 712/100 offers performance of 117.2 SPECint92 and 144.2SPECfp92 and includes 256KB of shared cache and supports up to 192MB of memory.

These workstations further strengthen HP's Empowered Engineering environment -- the industry's most comprehensive and powerful set of technical-computing solutions. Empowered Engineering, comprising leadership hardware platforms, an extensive breadth of engineering-software applications, collaborative tools and connectivity solutions and industry-leading service and support, is designed to solve the most challenging problems in a customer's concurrent engineering enterprise.

HP'S PRICE/PERFORMANCE LEADERSHIP

The new HP workstations offer significant price/performance advantages to customers in HP's target markets over comparably configured workstations from competing vendors. For example, the Model 712/100, priced at $15,000 (U.S.), offers 70 percent greater floating-point and 60 percent greater integer performance than Sun Microsystems' SPARCStation 20 Model 51, which is $16,000.

The Model 715/100 XC outperforms Sun's recently announced SPARCStation 20 Model HS-21, Sun's highest performing uniprocessor workstation, at a comparable price. In addition, the Model 715/100 XC offers 41 percent greater floating-point performance than Silicon Graphics' SGI Indigo2R-4400/200MHz at a lower entry price.

"As cache-intensive applications are increasingly developed for use in the electronic-design market, software developers like Cadence require high-performance workstations that offer expanded cache to help meet the time-to-completion requirements of our customers," said Steve Caplow, director of simulation marketing for Cadence. "Cadence has partnered with HP on its new NC-Verilog product based on its technical leadership and commitment to develop customer-driven, high-level design platforms. The Model 715/100 XC extends the PA-RISC(1) architecture and provides a high-performance design solution for our joint customers."

U.S. PRICES AND AVAILABILITY -0-

WORKSTATION MODEL        CONFIGURATION            PRICE

Model 712/100            16MB memory              $11,310
                         525MB disk
                         17-inch color monitor
Model 712/100            32MB memory               15,000
                         1GB disk
                         20-inch color monitor
Model 715/100 XC         32MB memory               21,000
                         1GB disk
                         20-inch color monitor

Board-upgrade options are immediately available for installed-base customers. New systems are expected to be available during the third quarter of 1995.

Hewlett-Packard Company is a leading global manufacturer of computing, communications and measurement products and services recognized for excellence in quality and support. HP has 98,600 employees and had revenue of $25 billion in its 1994 fiscal year. -0-

NOTE TO EDITORS: SPEC stands for System Performance Evaluation Cooperative, an industry-standard benchmarking group.

(1) PA-RISC stands for Precision Architecture, HP's name for its reduced-instruction-set computing (RISC) technology.

CONTACT: Copithorne & Bellows for HP

Tim Hurley, [phone]

or

Hewlett-Packard Company

Heidi Sullivan, [phone]