At the 2004 World Economic Forum in Davos, Hector de J. Ruiz announced AMD's ambitious 50X15 initiative, a global commitment to empower 50% of the world's population with computing and Internet access by the year 2015.
Oct. 28th AMD will release a new machine, a low cost Win CE PC called the Personal Internet Communicator.
The PIC will run on a AMD Geode GX500 366MHz processor with 128mb of DDR SDRAM, a 10G HD, Audio and a 56k modem.
It's Manufacturer, Solectron is in Mexico, Dr. Ruiz was born in Mexico and I had the honor of meeting him twice in the past year. When we met at the Athlon 64 Launch in San Francisco we had a good talk about enabling the energetic and abundant youth of Mexico with computers. We met again in May at a swanky NYC Tech event complete with a wine reception and continued our conversation, he didn’t speak about the PIC but a gleam in his eye told me he was up to something.
Lots of people talk about the digital divide but few actually go out and do something to bridge it. This is a great initiative; it’s not a charity, but a business model that will help the adoption of the Geode chip, realize the utility of Windows CE and raise the potential of thousands of people around the globe.