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Technology Stocks : Nokia Corp. (NOK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (4102)	7/24/2006 8:30:03 AM
From: scratchmyback	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9255

Slightly off-topic, but I wonder if AMD's acquisition of ATI came as a surprise to Nokia and what they think about it. Here are three news items, two of them from last May and the latest one from today. - - - - ATI acquires Bitboys Oy, a leading developer of mobile graphics technology Markham, Ontario - May 2, 2006-ATI Technologies Inc. (TSX:ATY, NASDAQ:ATYT) has acquired privately held Bitboys Oy, a 15-year veteran of the graphics industry for up to €35.2 million (about US$44 million). The final value is subject to certain performance-related conditions. Bitboys brings valuable engineering experience, technology and customer relationships that enhance ATI's existing mobile phone multimedia offerings. Based in Finland, the Bitboys team will be fully integrated in to ATI's Handheld Business Unit, and form the nucleus for a key design centre for ATI in Europe. ATI is well-known in the mobile phone industry for providing high-performance graphics and multimedia solutions; this acquisition enhances ATI's product portfolio with a number of technologies, including OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics and OpenVG 1.0 2D vector graphics technologies optimized for high-volume mainstream mobile phones. These graphics cores will be supported by ATI's common software stack which covers its complete range of multimedia co-processors. This unified software environment allows developers to easily create content for a range of devices and offers mobile phone manufacturers faster time to market. "ATI gives us what we need to reach the next level," said Mikko Saari, CEO, Bitboys. "Their market presence and ability to sell our products as part of a complete multimedia lineup will prove incredibly valuable to us. It's a classic win-win, realizing value for both companies." "Bitboys dovetails into ATI perfectly," said Paul Dal Santo, GM of ATI's Handheld Business Unit. "Handsets are transitioning to hardware acceleration for graphics and multimedia, and the Bitboys team will play a critical role as we drive this key inflection point to make ATI the platform of choice for content providers." Vector graphics is a vital component of a multimedia product lineup as it will become the standard for creating user interfaces on mobile devices. It's a very compact format that allows more graphics to be stored on a phone and for content to be distributed much more efficiently over mobile networks. In addition, vector graphics content automatically scales to any screen resolution so developers can deliver content across a range of devices without reworking all of the art assets. - - - - Nokia, ATI Announce Partnership Thursday May 4, 8:43 am ET Nokia, ATI Technologies Partner to Bring Multimedia to Mobile Devices NEW YORK (AP) -- Nokia said Thursday it entered a partnership with Canada's ATI Technologies Inc., a maker of computer graphics chips and boards, to bring enhanced multimedia such as gaming and music to mobile devices. The companies said they are working together to provide music playback, gaming, mobile TV and video to Nokia customers. Espoo, Finland-based Nokia, the world's biggest cell phone maker, and ATI are "working to drive the complexity out of multimedia development by promoting open standards and providing integrated hardware, software and tools," Nokia said in a statement. ATI is expected to provide a dedicated a software development kit for developers in the fall of 2006. The two companies will hold a series of joint workshops in the second half of this year for key multimedia content developers, Nokia said. - - - - AMD Reported Near ATI Purchase 7/23/2006 7:14 PM EDT URL: thestreet.com Seeking to bolster its chip arsenal against rival Intel (INTC) , Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) reportedly plans to pay about $5.4 billion to acquire ATI Technologies (ATYT) . AMD and ATI were in "late stages" of talks Sunday and likely would announce a deal as early as Monday morning, according to a report on The Wall Street Journal's Web site Sunday that cited people familiar with the matter. The reported $5.4 billion price tag would mark an almost 29% premium to ATI's market capitalization of about $4.2 billion as of Friday. AMD is expected to pay mostly cash for Markham, Ontario-based ATI, with the remainder in AMD shares, the report said. ATI is best known for chips that handle PC graphics, but it also makes chip sets, which get data from a PC's memory and sometimes include graphics, the report noted. By purchasing ATI, AMD likely would be able to better compete with Intel, which makes chip sets and bundles them together with microprocessors. Shares of AMD lost $3.39 to close Friday at $18.26 after the chipmaker Thursday reported depressed sales. ATI Technologies gained $1.51 Friday to close at $16.56