Daily Tech News 25 September 2025

• Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme and Elite Not Quite So Extreme As All That, successors to the Snapdragon X Elite family. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 12 core X Elite performed pretty well among laptop chips, just slightly behind AMD's own 12 core chip, the Ryzen 370. So long as the software you were running was compatible, which wasn't always the case.
  
  It was doomed to irrelevance by a combination of high prices and being promoted with Microsoft's doomed Recall software which absolutely nobody wants or trusts.
  
  The X2 Elite Extreme updates the cores in unspecified ways, bumps the clock speed from 4.3GHz to 5GHz, increased the core count from 12 (8 fast plus 4 efficiency) to 18 (12 fast plus 6 efficiency), and also increases the memory with from 128 bits to 192 bits.
  
  Qualcomm claims this will increase multi-threaded performance by 75%, and given that it has 50% more cores that seems plausible.
  
  Laptops with the new chips will ship in the first half of next year.

• Also announced was the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, which delivers just 8 cores (2 fast plus 6 efficiency) but cuts power and clock speed for pocket-sized devices. (WCCFTech)
  
  Look for it in phones and tablets and overpriced washing machines.
  
  
  
• Australia's "eSafety Commissioner" is asking if GitHub is a social network that puts children at risk. (The Register)
  
  Python leads to Java. Java leads to COBOL. Cobol leads to job security.
  
  
  
• Experimental gene therapy appears to significantly slow the progress of Huntington's disease. (BBC)
  
  A particularly nasty hereditary degenerative disease, Huntington's typically first shows up in early middle age, when people likely already have children, and slowly eats away at the nervous system over twenty years or so.
  
  The new treatment doesn't cure it, but seems to slow progress by a factor of four. If treatment is started early, patients are likely to die of something else before the disease can progress that far.
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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