Hard Data Ltd. Announces Support for AMD'S Multiprocessing Architecture

EDMONTON, ALBERTA, CANADA -- 6/5/2001 -- Hard Data Ltd. today announced sales and support for the new AMD Athlon™ MP processor and the AMD-760™ MP multiprocessing chipset. Hard DATA plans to sell custom designed high performance workstations, servers and clusters based on the new AMD Athlon™ MP processors. These will be presented in both pedestal and in high density rackmount configurations.

"Hard Data Ltd. will offer workstations, servers, and clusters based on AMD's new line of AMD Athlon™ MP processors with Smart MP technology," said Maurice Hilarius, Hard Data Ltd. "We are delighted to be using AMD processor technology. To date we have seen no other product offer this level of x86 multiprocessing performance."

Hard Data Ltd. will be initially providing the AMD 760-MP chipsetdesign in 3 forms:

• A workstation/small server enclosure with dual 120mm cooling fans, 465W power, and accommodating up to 3 x 5.25" storage devices and 4 x 3.5" storage devices.
• A rack-mount (2 rack unit - 3.5") Cluster Node or Compact Server in 2U form factor.
• A rackmount (6 rack unit - 10.5") Server appliance with support for up to 15 hard disks, with 4 way redundant hot-swap power, hot-swap cooling components, and component-failure alarm functions.

These system offerings include a wide range of choice in high performance graphics, storage and memory options.

About the AMD Athlon™ MP Processor
The AMD Athlon™ MP processor with Smart MP technology is a seventh-generation x86 processor for high performance multiprocessing servers and workstations. AMD's innovative Smart MP technology features dual point-to-point, high-speed 266MHz system buses, which are designed to provide up to 4.2GB per second of sustainable bus bandwidth, and an optimized MOESI cache coherency protocol which manages data and memory traffic. The AMD Athlon MP processor, with stable Socket A infrastructure and support for DDR memory technology, has a high performance full-speed cache with hardware data pre-fetch, an advanced 266MHz front side bus with ECC support, a fully pipelined superscalar floating point engine, and an exclusive L2 Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB).

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy awarded AMD an ENERGY STAR® Certificate of Recognition for its energy-efficient processors, including the AMD Athlon MP processor. These processors can help manufacturers meet stringent ENERGY STAR specifications for a variety of appliances, equipment and other products. Products with the ENERGY STAR label are designed to use less energy, save money and help protect the environment. AMD Athlon MP processors are manufactured using AMD's .18 micron copper process technology in Fab 30 in Dresden, Germany.

About Hard Data
Hard Data specializes in manufacturing "true built to order" high performance Linux and UNIX Workstations, Servers and Beowulf Clusters based on the world's fastest processors. We complement our workstations and servers with a wide range of high performance storage solutions featuring redundant hot-swappable disk arrays, controllers, and power supplies.

Our systems will appeal to High Performance Technical Computing, Scientific Research Laboratories, Internet / Intranet File Services as well as Multimedia, Animation, 3D Modeling / Rendering and related Graphic Design, Mechanical CAD and Computational Fluid Dynamics applications where maximum computing performance is a requirement.

As builders of custom storage solutions, we offer a wide range of products and technologies designed to satisfy even the most demanding data processing needs.

Additional information about Hard Data Ltd. and their solutions can be obtained from their website at: http://harddata.com.