Qualcomm has unveiled its new Snapdragon X Series chips for laptops, in addition to its new system-on-a-chip for flagship phones. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip meant for “ultra-premium” Windows 11 laptops are designed to handle “complex, expert-level workloads” and to enable fast AI processing, as well as a multi-day battery life. Meanwhile, the Snapdragon X2 Elite chips come in two variants, one with 18 total cores and one with 12. Qualcomm claims that these processors are the “fastest, most powerful and efficient processors for Windows PCs.”

The company launched the first Snapdragon X Elite chip in 2023 as its successor to the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 line of laptop processors. Qualcomm changed its name back then to reflect the huge leap in performance. Microsoft released a lineup of Copilot+ PCs with the new Snapdragon chip in 2024. And then earlier this year, at CES, Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon X for Copilot+ PCs priced $600 and under. 

Qualcomm says that the new Elite Extreme chip can power laptops for scientists and professional creators who handle “computationally intense data analytics, professional media editing and scientific research.” It features the company’s third-gen Oryon CPU that can apparently run at up to 75 percent faster than competitors. The chip also comes equipped with Qualcomm’s Hexagon NPU, which it says is the “fastest NPU for laptops,” to enable simultaneous AI tools and experiences on Copilot+ PCs.

The lower tier Elite chips can still run at up to 31 percent faster and use 43 percent less energy than the previous generation. While they’re obviously meant for users who don’t handle more resource-intensive workloads, Qualcomm says they also enable simultaneous AI experiences. The first laptops powered by the Snapdragon X2 Elite processors will be available in the first half of 2026. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/qualcomm-says-its-new-snapdragon-chips-are-the-fastest-and-most-efficient-for-windows-pcs-084535090.html?src=rss

Doctors report the first successful treatment for Huntington’s disease using a new type of gene therapy given during 12 to 18 hours of delicate brain surgery. The BBC reports: An emotional research team became tearful as they described how data shows the disease was slowed by 75% in patients. It means the decline you would normally expect in one year would take four years after treatment, giving patients decades of “good quality life”, Prof Sarah Tabrizi told BBC News. The first symptoms of Huntington’s disease tend to appear in your 30s or 40s and is normally fatal within two decades — opening the possibility that earlier treatment could prevent symptoms from ever emerging. None of the patients who have been treated are being identified, but one was medically retired and has returned to work. Others in the trial are still walking despite being expected to need a wheelchair. Treatment is likely to be very expensive. However, this is a moment of real hope in a disease that hits people in their prime and devastates families. […]

It starts with a safe virus that has been altered to contain a specially designed sequence of DNA. This is infused deep into the brain using real-time MRI scanning to guide a microcatheter to two brain regions – the caudate nucleus and the putamen. This takes 12 to 18 hours of neurosurgery. The virus then acts like a microscopic postman — delivering the new piece of DNA inside brain cells, where it becomes active. This turns the neurons into a factory for making the therapy to avert their own death. The cells produce a small fragment of genetic material (called microRNA) that is designed to intercept and disable the instructions (called messenger RNA) being sent from the cells’ DNA for building mutant huntingtin. This results in lower levels of mutant huntingtin in the brain. […]

The data showed that three years after surgery there was an average 75% slowing of the disease based on a measure which combines cognition, motor function and the ability to manage in daily life. The data also shows the treatment is saving brain cells. Levels of neurofilaments in spinal fluid — a clear sign of brain cells dying — should have increased by a third if the disease continued to progress, but was actually lower than at the start of the trial.

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Qualcomm has launched the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, which the company claims is the “world’s faster mobile system-on-a-chip.” It was designed for flagship devices for manufacturers and smartphone brands that don’t make their own mobile platforms, with the first devices equipped with the SoC launching in the coming days. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is powered by the company’s third-generation Oryon CPU, which Qualcomm says “improves performance by 20 percent and CPU power efficiency by 35 percent.” Overall, the company is claiming that the platform has a 16 percent lower power draw, making it more efficient and enabling longer “sustained performance.”

Qualcomm

The new platform promises “lightning-fast” app launches and app switching for better multitasking. Qualcomm’s AI Engine allows on-device AI processing, as well, made possible by the company’s upgraded Hexagon NPU that’s apparently 37 percent than its predecessor. “With Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, you are at the center of your mobile experience,” said Chris Patrick, the SVP and generation manager for mobile at Qualcomm. “It enables personalized AI agents to see what you see, hear what you hear and think with you in real time.”

In addition, Qualcomm says the new SoC is the first mobile platform to enable recording in Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec, giving creators the ability to film on their phones for professional-level productions. Several smartphone brands have already committed to using the new platform for their flagship devices, including Samsung, OnePlus, OPPO, Honor, iQOO, Nubia, POCO, realme, REDMI, RedMagic, ROG, Sony, vivo, Xiaomi and ZTE. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/qualcomms-new-flagship-mobile-platform-is-the-snapdragon-8-elite-gen-5-060427445.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world’s oceans have failed a key planetary health check for the first time, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels, a report has shown. In its latest annual assessment, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said ocean acidity had crossed a critical threshold for marine life. This makes it the seventh of nine planetary boundaries to be transgressed, prompting scientists to call for a renewed global effort to curb fossil fuels, deforestation and other human-driven pressures that are tilting the Earth out of a habitable equilibrium. The report, which follows earlier warnings about ocean acidity, comes at a time of recordbreaking ocean heat and mass coral bleaching.

Oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface and play an essential role as a climate stabilizer. The new report calls them an “unsung guardian of planetary health”, but says their vital functions are threatened. The 2025 Planetary Health Check noted that since the start of the industrial era, oceans’ surface pH has fallen by about 0.1 units, a 30-40% increase in acidity, pushing marine ecosystems beyond safe limits. Cold-water corals, tropical coral reefs and Arctic marine life are especially at risk. This is primarily due to the human-caused climate crisis. When carbon dioxide from oil, coal and gas burning enters the sea, it forms carbonic acid. This reduces the availability of calcium carbonate, which many marine organisms depend upon to grow coral, shells or skeletons.

Near the bottom of the food chain, this directly affects species like oysters, molluscs and clams. Indirectly, it harms salmon, whales and other sea life that eat smaller organisms. Ultimately, this is a risk for human food security and coastal economies. Scientists are concerned that it could also weaken the ocean’s role as the planet’s most important heat absorber and its capacity to draw down 25-30% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Marine life plays an important role in this process, acting as a “biotic bump” to sequester carbon in the depths. In the report, all of the other six breached boundaries — climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows, and novel entities — showed a worsening trend. But the authors said the addition of the only solely ocean-centerd category was a alarming development because of its scale and importance.

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Intel has approached Apple about a possible investment and closer collaboration, following recent multibillion-dollar deals with Nvidia, the U.S. government, and SoftBank to stabilize the struggling chipmaker. Reuters reports: The iPhone maker and Intel have also discussed how to work more closely together, the report said, adding that the talks are at an early stage and may not lead to an agreement. Shares of Intel closed 6% higher after the news. […] Striking lucrative partnerships and persuading outside clients to use Intel’s factories remain key to its future. Intel has also reached out to other companies about possible investments and partnerships, according to the Bloomberg News report. The reported investment from Apple would come as another vote of confidence for Intel – Apple had been a longtime customer of Intel before it transitioned to using its own custom-designed silicon chips in 2020.

For Apple, which relies heavily on Intel’s rival TSMC to manufacture its chips, the new partnership would allow it to diversify its chipmaking supplier base – a move that would be valuable if geopolitical risks in Taiwan worsen due to China’s role in the region. It would also help Apple improve its relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump, by showing that it is investing in the United States – while much of Apple’s supply chain remains international, the company has committed about $600 billion to domestic initiatives over the next four years.

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This is a video of the DD Squad successfully launching a human dart 40 feet to a velcro wall dangling 30 feet above water. That’s fun, I would do that. And by that I mean push the button to launch somebody else before they were ready.

Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon X2 Elite and Extreme chips, claiming they’re the “fastest and most efficient processors for Windows PCs.” Built on 3nm with up to 18 cores and a 5GHz Arm CPU boost, the chips promise 31% more CPU power, up to 2.3x GPU performance, stronger AI processing, and “multi-day battery life,” with devices expected in the first half of 2026. The Verge reports: There’s also a new 80 TOPS Hexagon NPU, for AI tasks, that offers 37 percent more performance with a 16 percent power consumption improvement, the company claims. Qualcomm’s characterizing all of this as a “legendary leap in performance,” claiming the Elite Extreme in particular offers “up to 75 percent faster CPU performance” at the same power. But it doesn’t say who the competition is, or which chip it was up against, at least not in the press release. And while Qualcomm claims these power savings will lead to “multi-day battery life,” that’s also what the company said about last year’s Snapdragon X Elite.

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Neon Mobile, now the No. 2 social networking app in Apple’s U.S. App Store, pays users up to $30 per day to record their phone calls and sell the data to AI companies. The app claims to only capture one side of a call unless both parties use Neon, but its terms grant sweeping rights over recordings. TechCrunch reports: The app, Neon Mobile, pitches itself as a money-making tool offering “hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year” for access to your audio conversations. Neon’s website says the company pays 30 cents per minute when you call other Neon users and up to $30 per day maximum for making calls to anyone else. The app also pays for referrals.

According to Neon’s terms of service, the company’s mobile app can capture users’ inbound and outbound phone calls. However, Neon’s marketing claims to only record your side of the call unless it’s with another Neon user. That data is being sold to “AI companies,” the company’s terms of service state, “for the purpose of developing, training, testing, and improving machine learning models, artificial intelligence tools and systems, and related technologies.”

Despite what Neon’s privacy policy says, its terms include a very broad license to its user data, where Neon grants itself a: “…worldwide, exclusive, irrevocable, transferable, royalty-free, fully paid right and license (with the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to sell, use, host, store, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform (including by means of a digital audio transmission), communicate to the public, reproduce, modify for the purpose of formatting for display, create derivative works as authorized in these Terms, and distribute your Recordings, in whole or in part, in any media formats and through any media channels, in each instance whether now known or hereafter developed.” That leaves plenty of wiggle room for Neon to do more with users’ data than it claims. The terms also include an extensive section on beta features, which have no warranty and may have all sorts of issues and bugs. Peter Jackson, cybersecurity and privacy attorney at Greenberg Glusker, told TechCrunch: “Once your voice is over there, it can be used for fraud. Now, this company has your phone number and essentially enough information — they have recordings of your voice, which could be used to create an impersonation of you and do all sorts of fraud.”

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In a bid to slash red tape, the European Commission wants to eliminate one of its peskiest laws: a 2009 tech rule that plastered the online world with pop-ups requesting consent to cookies. From a report: It’s the kind of simplification ordinary Europeans can get behind. European rulemakers in 2009 revised a law called the e-Privacy Directive to require websites to get consent from users before loading cookies on their devices, unless the cookies are “strictly necessary” to provide a service. Fast forward to 2025 and the internet is full of consent banners that users have long learned to click away without thinking twice.

“Too much consent basically kills consent. People are used to giving consent for everything, so they might stop reading things in as much detail, and if consent is the default for everything, it’s no longer perceived in the same way by users,” said Peter Craddock, data lawyer with Keller and Heckman. Cookie technology is now a focal point of the EU executive’s plans to simplify technology regulation. Officials want to present an “omnibus” text in December, scrapping burdensome requirements on digital companies. On Monday, it held a meeting with the tech industry to discuss the handling of cookies and consent banners.

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Cloudflare blocked the largest-ever DDoS attack against a European network infrastructure company, which peaked at 22.2 Tbps and 10.6 Bpps. The hyper-volumetric attack has been linked to the Aisuru botnet and lasted just 40 seconds, but was double the size of the previous record. SecurityWeek reports: Cloudflare told SecurityWeek that the attack was aimed at a single IP address of an unnamed European network infrastructure company. Cloudflare has yet to determine who was behind the attack, but believes it may have been powered by the Aisuru botnet, which was also linked earlier this year to a massive 6.3 Tbps attack on the website of cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs. Aisuru has been around for more than a year. The botnet is powered by hacked IoT devices such as routers and DVRs that have been compromised through the exploitation of known and zero-day vulnerabilities.

According to Cloudflare, the 22 Tbps attack was traced to over 404,000 unique source IPs across over 14 ASNs worldwide. “Based on internal analysis using a proprietary system, the source IPs were not spoofed,” the company explained. The security firm described it as a UDP carpet bomb attack targeting an average of 31,000 destination ports per second, with a peak of 47k ports, all of a single IP address. Cloudflare revealed in July that the number of DDoS attacks it blocked in the first half of 2025 had already exceeded all the attacks mitigated in 2024.

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The pressure is mounting on business leaders to harness AI to make work faster, cheaper, and more efficient. That may thrill investors, but for employees, it could mean fewer jobs around the world. From a report: At the $320 billion software giant SAP, there will likely be a need for fewer engineers to deliver the same — or even greater — output, according to the company’s CFO Dominik Asam.

“There’s more automation, simply,” Asam told Business Insider. “There are certain tasks which are automated and for the same volume of output we can afford to have less people.” As a C-suite exec at Europe’s most valuable software company, Asam cautioned that this reality will only come true if the corporate world implements the technology properly. After all, a recent MIT study found that 95% of generative AI pilots have not met the mark. “I will be brutal. And I also say this internally. For SAP and any other software company, AI is a great catalyst. It can be either great or catastrophe,” Asam warned. “It will be great if you do it well, if you are able to implement it and do it faster than others. If you are left behind, you will have a problem for sure. We work day and night to not fall behind.”

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The first astronauts set to fly to the Moon in more than 50 years will do so in Integrity.

NASA’s Artemis II crew revealed Integrity as the name of their Orion spacecraft during a news conference on Wednesday at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“We thought, as a crew, we need to name this spacecraft. We need to have a name for the Orion spacecraft that we’re going to ride this magical mission on,” said Reid Wiseman, commander of the Artemis II mission.

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