ATI Technologies Inc. (TSX: ATY)(NASDAQ: ATYT) today announced that Stanford University has released software to utilize ATI processors for the Stanford's Folding@home distributed computing project, yielding an enormous increase in the speed of disease research. By enabling Folding@home participants to make use of the powerful processing architectures found in ATI Radeon® X1900 and Radeon® X1950 graphics cards, Stanford expects to gain new capabilities that have never been possible before, allowing researchers to address questions that were previously considered impossible to tackle computationally.(1) With this new processing power now tapped, researchers expect to discover even more about the science of protein folding and folding-related diseases, with potentially dramatic effect for studies into Alzheimer's, cancer, Huntington's and Parkinson's diseases among others.

"The quest to understand diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's is the reason why the Folding@home program exists, and with the phenomenal acceleration provided by ATI processors, we can truly say this is life-changing work," said Vijay Pande, associate professor of chemistry, and director, Folding@Home distributed computing project, Stanford University.

What is Folding@home?

Stanford University's Folding@home program studies the ways in which proteins fold, assembling themselves in order to carry out important functions in the body. While protein folding is critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, today the concept is still considered to be a mystery. When proteins do not fold correctly, consequences include a number of diseases, so to better understand this area, Stanford's Folding@home program groups hundreds of thousands of home computers together worldwide, studying folding by taking advantage of each computer's processing power to form a distributed supercomputer. Today the program consists of approximately 200,000 computers, using various computer processors.

With support for ATI processors, Folding@home participants and disease researchers are tapping into the new capabilities offered by these advanced architectures, with a Radeon X1900 card performing scientific calculations at 20x to 40x the speed of traditional computer processors.(2) At that rate, using the processing power of one ATI Radeon X1900, three years worth of research can now be done in just one month.(3) The processing power of just 5,000 ATI processors is also enough to rival that of the existing 200,000 computers currently involved in the Folding@home project; and it is estimated that if a mere 10,000 computers were to each use an ATI processor to conduct folding research, that the Folding@home program would effectively perform faster than the fastest supercomputer in existence today, surpassing the 1 petaFLOP level.

Folding@home is made up of a number of engine cores - software designed to calculate various aspects of molecular dynamics associated with protein folding. Stanford's Gromacs software core, introduced in May 2003, remains the fastest and one of the most optimized molecular dynamics codes in the world. Through the work of Stanford University researchers, the Gromacs software was tuned to take advantage of ATI's Radeon X1900 and Radeon X1950 products, delivering the massive speed up in processing referenced above. However, as versatile as the Gromacs code is when combined with ATI processors, some protein folding calculations cannot be performed on ATI hardware, and require the use of computer processors, and other engine cores.

Getting involved with Folding@home

To get involved with Stanford's University's Folding@home program and take advantage of the accelerated research capabilities of ATI processors, a Radeon X1900 GT, Radeon X1900 XT, Radeon X1900 XTX, Radeon X1900 CrossFire Edition, Radeon X1950 XTX, or Radeon X1950 CrossFire Edition is necessary along with the new Folding@home (graphics processing unit) GPU client and the ATI Catalyst 6.10 driver from ATI. Both the Folding@home GPU client and ATI Catalyst 6.10 driver are expected to be available Monday, October 2nd. For more information, visit http://www.ati.com or http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html. To join the ATI Folding@home team, use team number 51394.

For more information on ATI's other stream computing initiatives, please see related company announcements made today.

About ATI Technologies

ATI Technologies Inc. is a world leader in the design and manufacture of innovative 3D graphics, PC platform technologies and digital media silicon solutions. An industry pioneer since 1985, ATI is the world's foremost graphics processor unit (GPU) provider and is dedicated to deliver leading-edge performance solutions for the full range of PC and Mac desktop and notebook platforms, workstation, set-top and digital television, game console and handheld device markets. With fiscal 2005 revenues of US $2.22 billion, ATI has more than 4,000 employees in the Americas, Europe and Asia. ATI common shares trade on NASDAQ (ATYT) and the Toronto Stock Exchange (ATY).

Important Information Regarding Forward-looking Statements

Certain statements in this news release, including but not limited to the performance, capabilities, applications and possibilities for stream computing using ATI Radeon processors, including statements relating to increasing the speed of disease research and scientific discovery, and the potential of distributed computing using ATI processors to conduct folding research, may be considered "forward-looking". Such forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and, accordingly, entail various risks and uncertainties. Assumptions applied in making, and potential risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from such forward looking statements include, among others, the ability to drive adoption of stream computing and to build the required ecosystem and install base, software and/or hardware-related issues and conflicts, the development of new products or technologies, overall system or network performance and continued demand for accelerated processing. We therefore cannot provide any assurance that such forward-looking statements will materialize. We assume no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or any other reason. Additional information concerning risks and uncertainties affecting our business and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statement is contained in our filings with Canadian and U.S. securities regulatory authorities, including our 2005 Annual Information Form and 2005 Annual Report filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Our Form 40-F and other filings we make with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission are available on EDGAR at www.sec.gov.

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(1). Prior to the processing speed increase achieved by using ATI processors and improved software for Folding@home, calculating intricate folds for complex proteins would take upwards of three years - a timeframe that is not feasible or realistic for protein studies.

(2). Based on Stanford University's testing that compares work unit processing on an Intel® Pentium® 4 2.8 GHz processor vs. similar processing being conducted on a Radeon X1900 XT.

(3). Using 40x speed-up as a metric, what used to take 3 years (1095 days), now takes less than one month (approximately 27 days).