The Hindu : A chance for computer whizkids to strike it rich

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Nov 01, 2003

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A chance for computer whizkids to strike it rich

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore Oct. 31. Think you have what it takes to create compelling applications in the new desktop computer environment that is slated to jump from 32 to 64 bits? Then get cracking! U.S. chip maker AMD which last month launched the first 64-bit processor chip for the dominant Windows PC market — the Athlon 64 — is to announce a contest with "a generous cash prize" for the Indian programmer who comes up with the best application exploiting the new desktop regime.

Why in India? Because, says Henri Richard, AMD's Senior Vice-President for Worldwide sales and marketing, the top creative talents are all here and "India will play a leading role in designing 64-bit applications". He attributes this to the "rich, media-centric culture" here — which is another way of saying Indians are crazy about cinema and similar entertainment and that Indian computer whizkids come naturally equipped to create rich multimedia products to fuel the market.

Having launched the 64-bit Opteron chip for high-end servers and the Athlon 64 for the desktops and laptops, in India, AMD would like to point customers at applications that can exploit this beefed-up number crunching capacity.

The core consumer market lies in graphically-rich computer games. So AMD, having apparently decided to catch them young, today joined hands with the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) here, to set up a 64-bit applications lab, gifting an Opteron-based server and some Athlon-based PCs.

The IIIT director, S. Sadagopan, told The Hindu that the lab would be useful in giving students a first hand feel for the emerging 64-bit regime and would hopefully motivate them to come up with some interesting and `desi' applications.

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