Following acquisition of Finland-based Bitboys Oy, ATI Technologies, the world’s largest supplier of graphics processors, announced signing of strategic relationship with Nokia, one of the world’s major supplier of mobile phones and other communication equipment. Under the terms of the agreement Nokia will equip its products with ATI’s developments.

“We are announcing our collaboration with ATI now, so that developers have the next 12 to 18 months to be innovative and create world class mobile multimedia experiences,” said Ilkka Raiskinen, senior vice president, multimedia experiences, Nokia.

ATI and Nokia will be working together to drive “high quality multimedia experiences”, such as music playback, 3D gaming, mobile TV, video and more for Nokia mobile device users worldwide. The companies indicated that they would be promoting open standards and providing integrated hardware, software and tools to content creators, which will allow developers to create content once for consumers to enjoy on a range of devices only once.

ATI aims to provide a dedicated tools chain and software development kit (SDK) for developers in the fall of 2006. ATI and Nokia will also hold a series of joint workshops in the second half of this year to showcase the environment to key developers.

The announcement of ATI-Nokia deal follows the acquisition of Bitboys, a developer of vector 3D graphics processors for mobile devices, which received €4 million ($5.07 million) from Nokia Growth Partners (NGP), a $100 million venture capital fund established by Nokia in December 2004. Nevertheless, the deals may not have any relations to each other, as ATI already had some relations with Nokia.