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Daily Tech News 29 September 2025

Top Story

• Intel plans production of its next-gen Panther Lake laptop chips starting in Q1 of next year on its brand new 18A (1.8nm) process node. (WCCFTech)
  
  Chips take a good six months to make it from production start to consumer devices on store shelves, so expect these to appear in laptops in late Q3 next year.
  
  Panther Lake will offer up to 4 performance cores, which is... Not a lot. They will pair these with up to 8 efficiency cores and 4 low-power cores, but at the moment all the models except the fastest are looking pretty anemic.
  
  

Tech News

• AMD's Strix Halo CPU has a 40 core graphics chip paired with two much smaller 8 core CPU chiplets. But those 8 core chiplets are different from the 8 core chiplets used in all socket AM4 and AM5 CPUs. (WCCFTech)
  
  All multi-die AMD CPUs use Infinity Fabric over a high-speed serial link to wire things together. This limits the memory bandwidth for a single consumer CPU chiplet to a fair bit less than fast DDR5 RAM can offer.
  
  Except for Strix Halo, where the 16 CPU cores have twice the write bandwidth of a 16 core 9950X.
  
  That's because it doesn't a serial bus of any kind to connect the chiplets; the CPU dies are placed directly adjacent to the GPU die and the gap is bridged by a direct parallel connection over an advanced multilayer substrate from TSMC.
  
  We'll have to wait and see what happens with Zen 6 next year, but it's interesting that AMD was willing to spend the money on a different CPU chiplet just for Strix Halo.
  
  
  
• Looking for a new switch? Want two 400Gb ports, two 200Gb, eight 50Gb, and a 10GB management port? Think that would be wildly expensive? $1295 from Mikrotik. (Serve the Home)
  
  Which is still a lot for a home network switch - gigabit switches are so cheap these days you find them as toys in the better brands of breakfast cereal - but networking is one of the few places where you can get 20x the speed for not even 20x the cost, rather than prices shooting straight into the ionosphere.
  
  
  
• Asus will be releasing a fix for its stuttering gaming laptops. (Hot Hardware)
  
  Real soon now.
  
  
  
• Got a shipping notice for my Beelink Me Mini, a little under three days after I placed the order. Which is quite a bit less than the 30-35 days quoted by the site, even in knot math.

Mathematical Interlude

If you read that story the other day about knotting numbers and said, basically, as I did, huh?, here it is physically demonstrated.



Two conjectures - unproven, but previously considered very likely to be true - said that combining two knots of a known complexity would produce a combined knot with a complexity neither less nor more than the sum of the complexity of the two individual knots.

Here Matt physically combines two knots each with a complexity of 3, and shows the combined knot has a complexity of 5.

The procedure is actually a little complicated which explains why this sat unnoticed until someone could write a Python program to try out all the possible permutations, but once you know how to do it, still simple enough to prove the counterexample really works.




Musical Interlude







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