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Well the cat is out of the bag now and the winner is a new tablet called Surface from Microsoft. The thin (.5 inches) tablet was shown off today at the big event that Microsoft had planned for a long time. From the pictures we have seen it looks like a nice device 10.6 inches long with a gorilla glass display, full sized USB port, MIMO antenna for WiFi a track pad, 64 or 128GB of storage, and a built in kickstand. There is just one problem; Microsoft’s partners. By entering into the market like this Microsoft runs the risk of alienating their major partners for Windows based tablets.

Paul Otellini is leaving Intel. The duty of the CEO's in this giant chip developer has been Otellini's for the last eight years and he was only the fifth CEO in Intel’s 45 year history. A lot has changed since he became Intel's CEO back in 2005, mobile and tablet devices are becoming more and more popular and therefore the chips for them became an important part of the market. Otellini decided that it's time for a new generation to take over Intel and lead them into new successes in this field too.

According to reports on Bloomberg, Apple is working the possibility of a switch of all of their Mac PCs to ARM processors. If they do make this change it will be the third processor architecture they have gone through. Apple started with Motorola 68xxx series processors, to be switched to the PowerPC in 1994, and for the past seven years they have been running on the Intel x86 architecture. Most interesting of all is that Apple managed to successfully, usually with minimal shock to their customers, make such a fundamental transition every time by which they are unparalleled in the industry.

As companies race towards smaller and faster processors they continually run into a problem. This problem is one of current leakage. As the process used to make the individual transistors shrinks current leakage grows. There have been many concepts presented to combat this leakage some of which have been successful such as AMD’s SOI (Silicon on Insulator), Intel’s High-K Metal Gate and Tri-Gate Transistors. These work fairly well down to 28nm, but start to become less efficient at 22nm and below. Most agree that to move forward with smaller transistors a new material is needed.

Finally we have some insight into the new chips in Intel's Haswell line up. The Guys at the VR-Zone got a hold of the list of models whose launch is scheduled for the first half of 2013. The Haswell line of processors (Core i5 and i7) will initially consist of a total of 14 models - eight pieces will be more fuel efficient, and the rest will be "normal" processors for use in desktop computers.

Samsung has officially unveiled the Exynos 5 Octa, the first processor for mobile devices with eight physical cores. The processor is based on last year's ARM big.LITTLE design that uses 4 weaker and more fuel-efficient cores for less demanding tasks and four cores that become active when the mobile device needs maximum performance.

Two more pieces of the puzzle are falling into place with the move away from silicon in microprocessors. Silicon has been the mainstay for creating processors for… well for a very long time. However, it has its limitations as the need to make the transistors smaller continues to increase. Even if you are not a believer in More’s Law you still cannot get around the fact that processors (GPU CPU and “other”) are all growing more complex. This means that the number of components continues to grow and we are faced with a couple of choices; either die in the vacuum of space or… no wait that is someone else. The choices are actually very clear; make the processor dies larger and larger or shrink the manufacturing process.