It was the best-known secret of the year: ARM was prepping its first 64-bit CPU architecture to bash head-on with Intel in the low-power server market. ARM's official announcement finally came in October, and AppliedMicro revealed bold plans for the first 64-bit processor based on the new architecture.

With Microsoft readying its first ARM-compatible version of desktop/server Windows, PCs may flirt with ARM, too, although notebooks are more likely candidates than desktops. It's the first serious challenge from a non-x86 architecture that Intel has faced in 20 years.

Steve Jobs’s recent passing provoked not just a personal response, but widespread moaning about Apple’s future. Conspicuously missing, however, was speculation about the ways in which Jobs’s diminished role might improve Apple.

To some, any such speculation is heresy. Like everyone, however, Jobs was flawed. One flaw was well known but was mainly an internal company matter. Another was less recognized but may eventually harm Apple’s competitiveness.

Ever since multicore processors appeared a few years ago, programmers have been complaining about them. Distributing a software workload among multiple CPUs isn’t as easy as running a single-threaded program on a single CPU. Now AMD is doing something even more difficult—but it’s the future of computer science.

Suddenly, like a plunging guillotine blade, Intel has severed any hope that competitors will match its chip-fabrication technology for years to come. Last month I observed that the rest of the industry was gaining a little ground on Intel by adopting high-k metal-gate (HKMG) transistors—only four years after Intel’s HKMG debut in 2007. But now comes Intel’s next big leap: tri-gate transistors.