Phil Hester, AMD's chief technology officer, stopped by the Hot Chips conference here at Stanford University on Tuesday to talk a little more about Fusion, AMD's plan to integrate a graphics processor and PC processor onto the same chip. By the time the chip is ready around 2009, Hester thinks the growing explosion of video and 3D graphics on PCs these days will require an affordable chip that still delivers great graphics performance.

Apple, which last week asked that developers provide feedback on their experiences using pre-released builds of Mac OS Leopard, has followed up by seeding a significant stability update to the next-generation system software. The latest seed, labeled Mac OS X Leopard 9A500n, arrived via Leopard's Software Update mechanism as a 'recommended' update for all developers running Mac OS X Leopard build 9A499.

"With Bill Gates' announcement earlier this year that Windows Home Server would be available as a 'system builder' product (that means 'OEM' to most hardware geeks), enthusiasts and system builders alike have been looking forward to its release. With several different rumors being floated last week regarding when Windows Home Server would hit store shelves, we checked in with Microsoft to get the full and somewhat-confusing story. The short version is: it's already out in the wild, but catching a copy from your favorite reseller may prove tricky for at least two more weeks."

"A new startup out of MIT emerged from stealth mode today to announce that they're shipping a 64-core processor for the embedded market. The company, called Tilera, was founded by Dr. Anat Agarwal, the MIT professor behind the famous and venerable Raw project on which Tilera's first product, the TILE64 processor, is based. Tilera's director of marketing, Bob Dowd, told Ars that TILE64 represents a "sea change in the computing industry", and the company's CEO isn't shy about pitching the chip as the "first significant new chip architectural development in a decade". So let's take an initial look at what was announced about TILE64 today, with further information to follow as it becomes available."

"Apple's iWork '08 boasts improvements to the software suite's word processing and presentation applications, but - more importantly - it fills the suite's spreadsheet hole with Numbers. eWEEK Labs ran Numbers through its paces, and found it to be a strong addition to the productivity software market and a promising alternative to Microsoft Excel."

"The Debian project has updated the stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0. This update adds security updates to the stable release, together with a few corrections to serious problems. As always, the first point release also corrects a few issues that have been noticed too late in the release process to stop the release, but still should be fixed."