ACTIV FINANCIAL ANNOUNCES HARDWARE BASED MARKET DATA FEED PROCESSING STRATEGY

ACTIV Financial, a leading provider of low-latency market data solutions, today introduced ActivFeed MPU (Market Data Processing Unit), a hardware accelerated solution for low-latency exchange feed processing. ActivFeed MPU provides a highly cost-effective, scalable ticker plant solution that will dramatically reduce systemic latency and deliver significant Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) benefits to financial institutions processing direct exchange feeds.

“ACTIV solutions already drive many of the market’s leading participants including specialists, market makers, hedge funds, algorithmic-driven trading firms and exchanges,” said Frank Piasecki, President of ACTIV Financial. “ACTIV feed handlers are amongst the fastest available in the industry. Our new silicon based solution will take us to the next level in terms of both latency and throughput to enable us to deliver greater business value to our clients.”

ACTIV Financial is porting its highly successful market data ticker plant solution directly onto silicon using an FPGA co-processor and AMD64 technology with Direct Connect Architecture and HyperTransport™ technology. “We have been tracking this technology in our labs since we started the company and architected our software systems to enable hardware acceleration,” noted Mike Dunne, CTO of ACTIV Financial. “Our efforts have led to a system that not only offers key latency and TCO benefits, but will extend the world-class reliability and advanced operations management features of ACTIV’s systems. AMD64 technology enables us to efficiently integrate both the traditional AMD Opteron™ processor as well as a co-processor card which plugs directly into the CPU socket. The performance improvements for processing market data are astounding.”

“ACTIV Financial continues to provide innovative solutions to financial services customers with this advanced trading technology,” said Doug O’Flaherty, division manager for acceleration strategy, AMD (NYSE:AMD). “This is an excellent example of the achievements possible through AMD’s Torrenza initiative, which leverages the low-latency and high-bandwidth benefits of HyperTransport™ technology to allow close coupling of co-processors and AMD64 technology.”

ACTIV was founded with the product strategy of offering the lowest possible systemic latency to institutions with high time-value priority, in an environment of skyrocketing market data rates. This performance will be critical to addressing the OPRA message rates that are projected to double from today’s rates to 716,000 messages per second by January 2008.

Mike Dunne, CTO, said, “The amount of general purpose hardware needed to handle projected message rates for top-of-range systems is growing. The new MPU approach could potentially reduce an 8 to 12 server installation into a single hardware-accelerated device.”

Dunne continued, “The key issue for most of our clients is latency. Our software systems were among the first to break the millisecond barrier. We are now looking at order-of-magnitude improvement on that performance metric, and that is just a starting point.”