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SAN FRANCISCO -- Microsoft Corp., Intel and HP announced the world's first single-system TPC-C* benchmark result to surpass the 600,000 tpmC mark. This record-breaking performance benchmark of 658,277 represents enterprise transaction order handling performance that surpasses all competing platform results and sets a new standard for price/performance on 64-processor systems of $9.82/tpmC.** This announcement with Windows Server(TM) 2003 and SQL Server(TM) 2000 (64-bit) represents the crowning achievement of years in research and engineering to develop a high-performance server platform that delivers the highest tpmC performance in the world. Continued performance leadership, across all workloads, provides customers of every size with exceptional price/performance at a lower total cost of ownership than proprietary systems. Performance increases across a wide variety of workloads are evidenced in recent public benchmark results, including the Transaction Processing Performance Council's TPC-C and TPC-H, placing Windows Server 2003 with SQL Server 2000 (64-bit) in the top 10 of the leading industry benchmarks, consistently ranking them at the top for price/performance.