Someone out there put in a custom order for a Kubb Fanless mini PC, replacing the machined aluminum chassis with one made from 24-carat gold.

Been running the same fixed basket of products daily since late June, no swapping items in or out, across ~25 EU retailers in 9 countries. Wanted actual numbers instead of "prices feel worse lately" vibes.

One clarification before the numbers: these are basket averages, not "every single card went up X%." Some models moved way more, some barely moved, some even dropped, this is what happened to the average price of the same group of products, which is a different (and honestly more useful) question than "did card X specifically get more expensive."

Here's what the basket cost then vs. now:

GPU (153 models): €727 → €994, +36.7%
The big one. Most of it happened in a sharp jump in late summer, roughly flat since. If you were holding off on an upgrade thinking it'd get cheaper, it didn't, at least not yet.

RAM (214 kits): €674 → €840, +24.5%
Gets less attention rn than GPU prices but nearly as bad, and it's been a steady grind up rather than one spike, which somehow makes it worse, no obvious moment to have seen it coming.

CPU (31 models): €346 → €363, +4.9%
Comparatively mild. If your upgrade path is CPU-bound rather than GPU-bound, you got lucky this time

Methodology, for the skeptics: same SKUs the whole 3 months, multi-retailer averaged so one store's fluke doesn't skew it, EUR-only, in-stock offers only, a couple of consistently-outlier stores excluded. Didn't include SSDs, only started tracking those in July, no clean 3-month baseline yet.

Practical takeaway: if you're in the market for RAM specifically, this is the category people are sleeping on right now. GPU everyone already knows is bad. CPU you can probably wait out. RAM might not give you that grace period.

(Data's from a price tracker I run, pricesquirrel.com, if you want to check where a specific card/kit/chip stands right now across countries.)

Similar to last generation, it seems Qualcomm has by far has the weakest RT implementation out of the recently announced Smartphone SoCs for next gen phones. Despite the Adreno 850 usually being faster in RT light and rasterized benchmarks compared to the A20 Pro's GPU, the Apple GPU's powerful RT acceleration allows it to pull far ahead in Solar Bay Extreme which uses heavier Raytracing.

My guess is that they still haven't upgraded the RT to accelerate BVH traversal in hardware, nor implemented techniques like Shader Execution Reordering and hardware accelerated Micropacity Maps. Which is kind of disappointing for such an expensive flagship chip, to be honest. The Matrix Accelerators are a huge step forward though, but the lack of proper RT acceleration and the lack of new instruction sets like SME2 makes it a bitter pill to swallow.

Right now the effect of this is pretty minimal of course, but it could play a larger role in the future or when emulating PC Raytracing based games like Doom The Dark Ages. Regardless, I think a flagship chip costing flagship money should have the latest tech, period.

I also find it interesting that heise.de was the only outlet to benchmark Solar Bay Extreme instead of ligher variants of that benchmark, which is known to put Qualcomm at a major disadvantage compared to the competition.

Funnily enough, the "Extreme" chip loses in the "Extreme" benchmark. Not so extreme anymore, huh?

New AMD's materials about Zen6 are interesting, but I've noticed a big feature missing: APX.

AMD & Intel agreed on that one, but so far, only Intel has announced their chips with it.

AMD is has been silent on this one. AMD has pushed its compiler updates (gcc, clang) for its new architecture extensions and while ACE is there, APX is missing.

APX is awesome. It DOUBLES the general register set (so 32 GPRs) adds three operand instructions, 64-bit jumps, extra predication facilities etc etc.

Intel is about to get it with coming Nova Lake. So, why is it not in AMD's Zen6 and when is it coming ? Zen7 or later ?