MeeGo! Nokia’s hope for the future is developing at a quick pace, and considering the rather lukewarm reception of Nokia’s Symbian^3 devices, that quick pace is more than justified. MeeGo got a big boost today with AMD announcing support for the platform. The company puts its money where its mouth is, too.

AMD announced at the MeeGo conference that the chip maker will join The Linux Foundation’s MeeGo project, pledging not just encouragement but also engineering expertise – which hopefully means developers and plain ol’ cash.

“MeeGo represents an exciting, open-source mobile operating system we expect to be adopted by mobile and embedded device makers over time,” said Ben Bar-Haim, AMD’s corporate vice president of software development, “We are glad to provide engineering resources to joint industry efforts like MeeGo and expect that this operating system will help drive our embedded plans and create expanded market opportunities for our forthcoming Accelerated Processing Units.”

Of course, this is not entirely altruistic, as Bar-Haim already hints at. AMD pretty much missed the netbook revolution, doesn’t play a role in smartphones, and they’re not playing much of a role in the tablet frenzy either. By expressing support for MeeGo and maybe even dedicating some actual resources to it, they are probably hoping to grease the wheels a bit in this department.

Altruism or no, The Linux Foundation is rightfully happy with AMD’s support. “Built from the ground up for a whole new class of mobile computing devices, MeeGo gives companies like AMD and its partners unlimited opportunities to accelerate innovation for the next generation of computing,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation, “As an existing Linux Foundation member, AMD will be an important and valuable contributor to the MeeGo Project.”

Hopefully, this will help MeeGo mature even faster. New platforms means more competition, and more competition is always good for us consumers.