Reviewers – including us – got their grubby little hands on AMD’s long-awaited “Bulldozer” 8-core FX -8150 chip a week ago, and while there is plenty to like with the processor, a lot of folks were expecting, well, a bit more. Benchmark tests showed performance similar to Intel’s Core i5-2500k pretty much across the board. But wait! AMD expects more efficient multi-core CPUs to work more efficiently with Windows 8 than they do with Windows 7. But will the news OS make that much of a difference?

The tablet war has pretty much been a two horse race: Apple vs. Android. (Yeah, we know about the PlayBook, but let’s be realistic.) And that race has been like a blowout as the iPad 2 has been galloping away from the competition pretty handily. Microsoft’s hoping to hit the ground running with Windows 8 sometime soon, however, and they’ve just got a boost from Dell, who says they plan on heavily supporting the upcoming operating system.

At first glance, Microsoft’s decision to go with UEFI instead of BIOS seemed like a decent security-minded step. Microsoft plans on requiring that all PCs shipping with Windows 8 implement the secure boot option included in recent UEFI specifications. That’s good, right? It stops malware from playing around with the boot path and disabling antivirus programs! The smiles faded into looks of concern when it was pointed out that a PC with only OEM and Microsoft secure boot keys couldn’t launch Linux distros. The ‘Net raged, and yesterday, Microsoft responded to the allegation.