The agreement is a key part of Intel's program to accelerate trading and innovation in the financial markets, and it builds upon a benchmarking relationship that Intel established with STAC over a year ago.

The STAC Benchmark Council was formed in September 2007 to define industry-standard ways of measuring latency, capacity, power efficiency, and other key performance attributes of solutions used in the trading process. The Council, which includes global trading firms such as Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and HSBC, as well as leading technology vendors, is defining benchmark specifications across the domains of market data, analytics, and execution. By joining the Council, Intel will contribute its expertise in benchmark specification to help ensure that STAC Benchmarks are as useful to the industry as possible.

Intel has also made a multi-year commitment to provide the Manhattan-based STAC Lab with the latest Intel technologies. This includes its just-announced 45-nanometer Intel Xeon processor 5400 series ("Harpertown"), which preliminary STAC testing has found to decrease power consumption by 20% over a previous Xeon processor 5300 series ("Clovertown") when supporting the same market data workload. It also includes the 16-core Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 7300 series ("Caneland") platform and Intel I/O Acceleration Technology (I/OAT), which broke records for market data throughput in recent STAC testing. STAC has added all of these products to its "Racked-and-STAC'd" list, which is the inventory of products available for customer-sponsored projects.

The STAC Lab contains advanced load-generation mechanisms, precise timing equipment, market data, and test tools pre-integrated with leading applications. Intel is equipping STAC with software tools, training, and engineering support to help customers and software vendors achieve optimized performance on Intel architectures.

The STAC Lab will complement Intel's Low-Latency and Innovation Labs in London and New York, where test harnesses can also be deployed to take advantage of Intel engineers' expertise in tuning and optimization.

"Intel is excited to support the efforts of STAC and the securities firms on the STAC Benchmark Council to bring more transparency to technology performance in the capital markets," said Nigel Woodward, Director, Financial Services at Intel UK. "In a short period of time STAC has become a vital resource for the securities industry. Working with STAC will make it easier for Intel to demonstrate its performance leadership to customers in this market."

"Intel is a very influential force for technology innovation in the capital markets, and we are delighted to have their support for the STAC mission," said Peter Lankford, Director of STAC. "Intel's experience in standards and benchmarking will be a valuable resource for the STAC Benchmark Council. And Intel's commitment to the STAC Lab will help the securities industry rapidly discover how to get the most value from an important range of new technologies."