The Exynos 5 Octa is the first to implement the ARM big.LITTLE processing technology based on the Cortex A15 CPU.

Today's high-end smartphones are going to seem like little more than slow relics before the year is over. ARM's licensing partners have come out swinging at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, including Samsung, which earlier today introduced the Exynos 5 Octa. As the name suggests, it's an 8-core processor and the world's first mobile chip to use ARM's new big.LITTLE technology.

AMD sounded energitic and optimistic during its press conference at CES.

Hours after Intel took to the stage at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to talk about its ambitious mobile strategy, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) followed suit with a press conference of its own, only it didn't talk about entry-level smartphones for emerging markets. AMD came out reiterating its Surround Computing strategy, a topic it's brought up before. Somewhat spunky and confident, this wasn't an AMD that sounded like it's about to roll over and play dead. Let's have a look at some of the highlights.

The majority of Windows 8 tablets won't start shipping until 2013.

Wondering where all the Windows 8 tablets that were supposed to ship before the end of the year are hiding? It seems they've all been bitten by a driver bug, or at least the ones built around Intel's Atom Z2760 processor. The "Clover Trail" part is an energy efficient CPU that promises all-day battery life, but it's reportedly been challenging trying to code drivers that are stable enough to pass Microsoft's Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) testing.

It's been recently rumored that Intel is taking steps towards a socket-less future, perhaps sooner than you think. The rumor originates from a Japanese website, which reported that Broadwell, the 14nm successor to next year's Haswell, would not come in an LGA package. Such a scenario would effectively neuter the enthusiast DIY market, and AMD wants no part of the castration process, at least not in the near future.