Times may be tough, but there are those who still think the U.S. is the land of opportunity.

One of them is NEC, which has decided that the time is right to make a play for North America now that it largely dominates its home country of Japan.

The tip of the wedge will be the 5800/A1160, also known as the Monster Xeon Server by virtue of its size (64 cores on 12 CPUs, plus 384 GB of RAM) and its speed (1,400 tpsE on the TPC-E benchmark). It's one of the first units sporting the six-core Intel 7400 (Dunnington) chips and can scale for a one-node, four-socket device with 16 cores and 256 GB to a four-node, 16-socket unit with 96 cores and more than 1 TB.

The company is also coming in with an Itanium machine with dynamic partitioning, as well as a line of Fault-Tolerant servers with internal hardware redundancy and a series of blades and low-cost devices for SMBs.