As is reported elsewhere, HP commissioned a Tolly (#211127) study in 2011. Tolly found some Cisco and Juniper cruft to compare against. HP commissioned testing of switch stacks in a way that their switch-to-switch interconnect would be important. The test was done with multiple streams cris-crossing the switch to test its full capacity. Comments in the report claim that if the number of buffers had been reduced from four to two, the HP3800 would have performed even better. A quote from the data sheet lifted as an image says:

That HP would tell you that you can do more without telling you anything about how much is itself worthy of some kind of award. We are taking Tolly's microburst test result as the answer appropriate for the HP3800.

This switch uses HP's proprietary ProVision silicon.