TOKYO, JAPAN - Fixstars Corporation (“Fixstars”) announced today the new accelerator board “GigaAccel™ 180” which features the latest edition of the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.) chip fabricated by IBM. Fixstars will start taking orders for this product on 10 April, and shipping will begin in mid August. The price of “GigaAccel 180” is 880,000 yen (before tax) as a standalone, and 980,000 yen (before tax) as part of a workstation package.

“GigaAccel 180” is an accelerator board with the latest Cell/B.E. microprocessor on board. The astonishing 180 GFLOPS performance by the Cell/B.E. chip is utilized by integrating it into PC workstations with PCI Express slots. Large scale clustering systems need not be built to run applications that require heavy arithmetic processing, such as financial modeling for calculating values of stocks and derivatives, scientific computing needed to recreate or predict complex systems such as physics, science, and economics, as well as for computer diagnostic imaging needed for medical image processing.

Fixstars will continue to port our image processing, signal processing, financial modeling, and codec applications from Cell/B.E. to “GigaAccel 180”, and plans on providing packaged solutions to financial, medical, oil exploration, semiconductor fabrication, and multimedia industries.

Fixstars CEO Satoshi Miki said the following about the release of the GigaAccel 180, “We will be able to provide significantly more accessible Cell/B.E. systems by basing them on GigaAccel 180. We will provide added value to GigaAccel 180 by developing unique packaged solutions.”

Fixstars will be present at the NAB Show (National Association of Broadcasters), which starts in Las Vegas on 14 April, to showcase “GigaAccel 180”, and to hold briefings and demonstrations using codec software.

IBM Japan provided OEM support for the production of the accelerator board using the latest Cell/B.E. microprocessor, and “GigaAccel 180” is distributed as an own brand product.

Detail of GigaAccel 180

About Fixstars

Fixstars Corporation provides software technology solutions that target Cell/B.E. with a vision of the future where multi-core microprocessors are the standard. Fixstars provides total Cell/B.E. solutions from hardware acquisition, development environment set up, to software development, especially for financial, medical, and digital media industries.

About the Cell Broadband Engine™

Cell Broadband Engine™ is a microprocessor jointly developed by SONY, Toshiba, and IBM. It is a multi-core chip containing the 64-bit Power processor core and multiple, independent SIMD processor cores. This architecture makes real-time multimedia processing possible, which enables this chip to be used not only in next generation electronics and computer entertainment systems, but also in many other fields such as science and technology simulation systems. Currently PLAYSTATION�3 and the IBM Blade Servers use the Cell/B.E.

� 2008 Fixstars Corporation. All rights reserved.
“GigaAccel” is a trademark of Fixstars Corporation. Fixstars name and logo are registered trademarks of Fixstars Corporation (including pending applications). “IBM” is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States and other countries. “Cell Broadband Engine” and “Cell/B.E.” are trademarks of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks belong to their rights holders. Contents may change without prior notice.

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