SUNNYVALE, California: Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is entering the virtual world. It opened the AMD Dev Central Pavilion on the Dev Central Island in the virtual world of Second Life. The company said by having a presence on Second Life it is extending its developer outreach program into virtual space for meetings, lectures, training programs and networking opportunities for developers.
On Second Life, AMD joins IT firms like Dell, CISCO, IBM and Sun Microsystems, which have all set up their presence.
The Dev Central Island is located within the Second Life Dev Archipelago, which is a series of interconnected islands dedicated to the virtual developer community.
The AMD pavilion includes an auditorium, which is a formal place for tech chats between residents, as well as a display hall, meant as an exhibition area featuring interactive booths, banners and streaming videos.
Paul Nolte, AMD's project manager and contributing builder for the AMD pavilion, said through the interactive virtual experience at the pavilion, the company hopes to provide developers with an outlet to learn and grow, such as helping them to optimize native code for multithreaded applications.
AMD is sponsoring a three-month treasure hunt contest for residents of Second Life to celebrate the occasion. Participants can use the interactive Linden scripting language and open source programming challenges. Developers who successfully complete the challenges in the virtual pavilion will be entered into a prize drawing for a Dell Dimension E521 personal computer.
The three-dimensional online world of Second Life has been created by San Francisco-based Linden Lab.
