AMD gives developers a Second Life

Stan Beer
Monday, 19 February 2007 07:38

Your IT - Home IT

Chip manufacturer AMD has become the latest high tech vendor to latch on to the fast growing phenomenon of setting of shop in the cyber fantasy world created by Linden Lab known as Second Life. AMD intends to use Second Life as virtual meeting place to better connect with developers and to help them network with each other.

For its debut on Second Life, AMD has opened the AMD Dev Central Pavilion on AMD Dev Central Island located within the Second Life metaverse, to extend its Developer Outreach program into a virtual space for meetings, lectures, training courses and networking opportunities for developers.

AMD Dev Central Island is located within the Second Life Developer Archipelago, a series of interconnected virtual "islands" dedicated to the Second Life developer community at large. The AMD Dev Central Pavilion includes the AMD Auditorium, a formal place for tech chat-style events and the AMD Display Hall, a virtual exhibition hall featuring interactive booths, scripted banners, informal gathering places and streaming videos.

“The Second Life metaverse is a gathering place for both new and established developers,” said Paul Nolte, AMD project manager and contributing builder for the AMD Developer Central Second Life Pavilion. “Through the interactive virtual experience at the pavilion, we hope to provide developers with an outlet to learn and grow, such as helping them to optimize native code for multi-threaded applications.”

As a lure for developers, AMD will host a three-month treasure hunt contest with interactive Linden scripting language and open source programming challenges. Developers who successfully complete the challenges in the Pavilion will be entered into a prize drawing for a highly configured Dell Dimension E521 system, including a dual-core AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor, 4GB DDR2 SDRAM, 320GB Serial ATA Hard Drive,  and 20-inch widescreen digital flat panel monitor.

"The treasure hunt and future developer challenges provide a creative outlet for developers to express their unique abilities," said AMD's Nolte.