Bitboys Oy was a hardware development and licensing company based in

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of B ...

, founded in 1991 and acquired by

ATI Technologies ATI Technologies Inc. (commonly called ATI) was a Canadian semiconductor industry, semiconductor technology corporation based in Markham, Ontario, Markham, Ontario, that specialized in the development of graphics processing units and chipsets. Fo ...

for up to

US$ The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

44M on May 2, 2006. Until the acquisition, Bitboys had focused on

mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...

gaming Gaming may refer to: Games and sports The act of playing games, as in: * Legalized gambling, playing games of chance for money, often referred to in law as "gaming" * Playing a role-playing game, in which players assume fictional roles * Playin ...

, and had developed a large

vector graphics Vector graphics is a form of computer graphics in which visual images are created directly from geometric shapes defined on a Cartesian plane, such as points, lines, curves and polygons. The associated mechanisms may include vector display a ...

-related portfolio. Bitboys was formed by some of the members of the

demogroup Demogroups are teams of demosceners, who make computer based audio-visual works of art known as demos. Demogroups form a subculture collectively known as the demoscene. Groups frequently consist of students, young computer enthusiasts who spend ...

Future Crew Future Crew was a Finnish demogroup that created PC demos and software, active mostly between 1987 and 1994. History The group was founded in 1986 by PSI (Sami Tammilehto) and JPM (Jussi Markula) as a Commodore 64 group, before moving to the PC ...

. Bitboys became infamous after the 1999 announcement of their

Glaze3D Glaze3D was a family of graphics cards announced by BitBoys Oy on August 2, 1999, that would have produced substantially better performance than other consumerPetri Nordlund. "Glaze3D". Bitboys Oy. products available at the time. The family, which ...

series of

graphics card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer moni ...

s, which later turned out to be

vaporware In the computer industry, vaporware (or vapourware) is a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is late or never actually manufactured nor officially cancelled. Use of the word has broade ...

. When

Infineon Technologies Infineon Technologies AG is a German semiconductor manufacturer founded in 1999, when the semiconductor operations of the former parent company Siemens AG were spun off. Infineon has about 50,280 employees and is one of the ten largest semicond ...

shut down its embedded

DRAM Dynamic random-access memory (dynamic RAM or DRAM) is a type of random-access semiconductor memory that stores each bit of data in a memory cell, usually consisting of a tiny capacitor and a transistor, both typically based on metal-oxid ...

production line, Bitboys quickly transformed from PC desktop graphics chip business to mobile graphics IP business. They could not find another manufacturer capable of producing the part because of the high amount of embedded

used. After the merger of ATI into the

AMD Graphics Product Group Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

, the entire BitBoys Oy team was acquired by

Qualcomm Qualcomm () is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, and incorporated in Delaware. It creates semiconductors, software, and services related to wireless technology. It owns patents critical to the 5G, 4 ...

on January 22, 2009, following the sale of AMD

Imageon Imageon (previously ATI Imageon) was a series of media coprocessors and mobile chipsets produced by ATI (later AMD) in 2002–2008, providing graphics acceleration and other multimedia features for handheld devices such as mobile phones and Person ...

IP to Qualcomm.

References

External links

Bitboys Oy official website (archived version 2006)
Graphics hardware companies Electronics companies established in 1991 Electronics companies of Finland Finnish companies established in 1991 2006 mergers and acquisitions 2009 disestablishments in Finland Electronics companies disestablished in 2009 {{Europe-videogame-company-stub