Chip giant AMD has announced the AMD 785G chipset – which has been designed to be 'at the core of the mainstream PC for Windows 7'.
The massive interest in Windows 7, combined with encouraging pre-orders for Microsoft's successor to Vista, has prompted AMD to push on with a new chipset that is aimed at the 'cost-conscious' mainstream market.
The AMD 785G chipset incorporates the company's ATI Radeon HD4200 graphics technology – allowing computers with motherboards using the chipset to run Direct 10.1 games.
The chipset has been designed to take advantage of AMD's Athlon II processors – giving PC manufacturers, and their customers, a mainstream affordable option that will show off Windows 7 in all its glory come October.
The chipset also offers:

• DirectX 10.1 support for the latest games
• UVD2 for accelerated, GPU-enabled, decoding
• First AMD chipset with ATI Stream technology for amazingly fast video transcoding and application performance
• Advanced technology to keep your PC running cool and quiet
• Latest support for HDMI 1.3 and DisplayPort
• SidePort Memory support for DDR3/DDR2 performance cache
• Hard disk performance improvements with RAID support

While the iPhone SMS security vulnerability has been hogging the headlines this week, it also emerged from the same conference that Mac OS X is at risk too.
Speaking at the Black Hat security event, Mac expert Dino Dai Zovi exposed an OS X coding loophole by installing a rootkit that could give hackers complete control of a Mac, allowing them to take even encrypted data from the other side of the world.
Bank accounts exposed
The 'Machiavelli' technique relies on using the Safari browser to get hold of encrypted data such as bank accounts and other personal information.
Dai Zovi explained his motivation in helping Apple work on better securing its machines, warning that hackers need only target OS X computers for general the Mac security complacency to dissolve into a serious problem.
Fairy dust
"There is no magic fairy dust protecting Macs," he pointed out, while another security expert added, "When the malware authors put out something that's really sophisticated we are going to have a whole population that is really vulnerable."