Hitachi Introduces 667MHz FSB Intel Itanium 2 Processor-based Blade Servers

July 19, 2005

Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT / TSE:6501) today announced the world's first server module product offering a high-speed Front Side Bus (FSB) speed of 667MHz(*1) on the latest 64bit Intel® Itanium® 2 processor (1.66GHz). The module of 'BladeSymphony' blade server, supporting the improved FSB speeds will be generally available in Japan on July 21, 2005.

The 667MHz FSB Intel Itanium 2 processor module of 'BladeSymphony' blade server achieved the world highest performance on SPEC CFP 2000 Benchmark(*2): widely used compute-intensive floating point performance benchmark. Hitachi's innovative proprietary chipset, high speed logic design, PCB packaging technology, and years of Mainframe design expertise contributed to the performance improvements.

The acceleration of the data bus from the processor through memory including the FSB resulted in up to 35% improvement of the effective memory bandwidth, when compared to the 400MHz FSB server module. Performance improvements will benefit customers requiring intensive data processing performance in areas such as, large-scale database processing, in-memory transaction processing, and complex computational processing.

"We are pleased with Hitachi's announcement today that it introduced a new server module based on the latest Intel Itanium 2 processor with 667MHz FSB and this server module achieved the highest SPEC CFP 2000 Benchmark," said Kazumasa Yoshida, vice president of the Sales and Marketing Group, Intel Corporation and co-president of Intel K.K.

"Intel Itanium 2 processor-based systems continue to make strides among companies' mission-critical systems and the High Performance Computing field with their high reliability, excellent price/performance, and the variety of open platform choices. Through collaboration with companies like Hitachi, Intel continues to forge ahead with platform innovations to meet the ever-increasing demands of enterprise computing."

*1) Front Side Bus (FSB) is a communication path connecting the processor with the memory sub-system, expansion bus, and I/O interface within a computer.
*2) SPEC CFP2000 test is based on SPECfp_base2000 (Actual: 2,801), and SPECfp_rate_base2000 (Actual: 56.7 @ 2-ways) measured results as of 7/19/2005.