Advanced Micro Devices and Cameron Sinclair, the founder of Architecture for Humanity announced on Friday the first ever Open Architecture Prize at the annual TED Conference in Monterey, California.

The $250,000 Open Architecture Prize is the largest prize in the field of architecture and is designed to be a multi-year program that will draw competition from design teams around the world.

Each year, a winning design will be selected from a field of low-cost, sustainable design projects and built in a selected community. The first project for the Open Architecture Prize will be an “e-community center,” a centralized building equipped with internet connectivity solutions designed to enable an entire community to access the transformative power of the Internet.

The winning designs will be built as part of the prize and in alignment with the 50×15 Initiative, a program founded by AMD to connect 50 percent of the world’s population to the Internet by 2015.

The network was unveiled yesterday at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) 2007 by Sinclair and a number of project supporters, including AMD, Hot Studio, and Sun Microsystems.

It brings together architects, designers and community organizers to freely share blueprints, ideas and resources for improvement projects in areas affected by geo-political, environmental or economic hardship.

The Open Architecture Network is hosted on Sun’s Sun Fire servers based on AMD Opteron processors at AMD’s global headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.