AMD offers cash prize for municipal Internet centre

By Alun Williams

Posted on 12 Mar 2007 at 07:12

AMD is continuing to push its philanthropic 50x15 Initiative, which has the goal of connecting 50 per cent of the world's population to the Internet by 2015. The processor and graphics technology company has announced a new Open Architecture Prize, for encouraging low-cost, sustainable design projects.

The first brief for which design teams will be able to compete is an 'e-community centre'. AMD describes this as 'a centralised building equipped with Internet connectivity solutions designed to enable an entire community to access the transformative power of the Internet.'

There is a $250,000 prize up for grabs, which - according to the company - makes it the largest prize in the field of architecture. The multi-year program is intended to draw competition from design teams around the world.

'The Open Architecture Prize delivers on Architecture for Humanity's vision of encouraging collaboration and challenging designers to reach beyond the traditional bounds of architecture to develop innovative solutions that improve global living conditions,' said AMD's director of the 50x15 Initiative, Dan Shine.

Importantly, the winning design is guaranteed to be built as part of the prize itself. Winning designs will also be made openly available through the Open Architecture Network, a kind of open source forum for architectural design.

'For far too long many great award-winning designs have gone undeveloped,' said Cameron Sinclair, executive director and co-founder, Architecture for Humanity, which has pioneered the award along with AMD. 'We are not only challenging the creative world to design innovative structures, we are going one step further and implementing the winning solution to positively affect thousands of lives.'

You can find more information about the 50x15 Initiative here.

While AMD is continuing with the general 50x15 Initiative, back in November 2006 it announced it was abandoning its plans for a sub $250 PC, the Personal Internet Communicator (PIC). This was designed to stimulate IT in developing countries and was first announced in 2004.