HP's website is legendarily disorganized and horrible.

Because you have to wwwait for it.

Gibson Guitars used to do this too with www2, but it looks like they've cleaned up their act.

IIRC, different internal groups get control of different www{n} subdomains.

www8.hp.com has two A records that point to Akamai. My guess is that it's easier to mess with a subdomain for global CDN stuff than the top level.