A new press release over on Zend.com states that they are offering a discount for the Zend PHP 5 Accelerator (knocking it down to $299 USD/yr).

Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP company, and creator of products and services supporting the development, deployment and management of PHP-based applications, is now offering a special discount price of 9 for a yearly subscription to Zend Accelerator for PHP 5 through the end of June, 2005. Zend Accelerator is built by the designers of Zend Engine 2, the heart of PHP 5, and is for any business using PHP 5 looking for optimum performance with their PHP applications, as well as best-in-class technical support, upgrades and documentation.

The Accelerator sites on your server, and uses "code caching techniques" to maintain a compiled, byte-code version of the requested page in memory. It claims to integrate closer with the PHP5 scripting engine than other accelerators might, but I wonder - really - what the performance difference would be...