Snapdragon X Elite
Qualcomm acquired Nuvia some time ago and has adopted Nuvia's technology to produce a new chip called the Snapdragon X Elite. Qualcomm claims it is the most powerful CPU to date. The chip is built on a 4nm process and has 136 gigabytes of memory bandwidth. The chip will supposedly deliver far more performance than Apple's M2 chip. It will also suck up more power than competing chips, but hey, that's what 850w power supplies are for, right? Qualcomm says PCs will have these chips by 2024. These are ARM chips, not x86_64 chips, so the question is whether or not Microsoft Windows will run on these PCs or, more important, whether Windows applications will be ready to run on ARM on these PCs. Linux shouldn't have any problems running on ARM.
Are Hard Drives Dead?
It depends. Do you run games on your PC? If so, you'd better have SSDs instead of hard drives in your computer. Many of the latest games require -- that's right, require -- an SSD in their minimum requirements for the game to run adequately. Look at the minimum requirements for any new games you're thinking of buying and you'll often see SSD listed among other specs. So be ready to ditch your old 7200 RPM hard drives.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux vs. CentOS Saga
The controversy over Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS continues to heat up. For years, CentOS was enough of a mirror image of RHEL that people used CentOS in order to avoid paying Red Hat for RHEL support. Red Hat acquired CentOS way back in 2014 but CentOS continued to be a free-as-in-beer version of RHEL. As a result, CentOS became more popular than RHEL. Red Hat was not pleased, so it has shifted CentOS into a new category, CentOS Stream. CentOS 8, which was the equivalent of RHEL 8, reached end-of-support in 2021. Oddly enough, CentOS 7 will still be supported alongside RHEL 7, through 2024. After that, people will either have to switch to RHEL or CentOS Stream, which have a different code base. CentOS Stream is considered a development (read: beta) of RHEL. New clones of RHEL are emerging, but only time will tell if they achieve the success formerly enjoyed by CentOS.
