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Historical memory prices 1960-2026

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Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#11

Post by levocardia »

fernly wrote: post #3

Says, not inflation-adjusted. With reason; adjusting those 1960-1980 prices for inflation would make the graph a lot taller. Pricing "per GB" before 1990 is unrealistic, though; nobody thought in GB or purchased GB quantities, or conceived of GB systems. I remember a moment circa 1973 when I saw an IBM CE about to do an upgrade on a 370 system at Cal Berkeley. He had a box with several carefully-packed, large circuit…

Yes, you really need "dollars per amount of RAM you need for standard computing tasks." Windows 11 requires a bare minimum of 4 GB of RAM, Window 10 only needed 1 GB.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#12

Post by micromacrofoot »

WithinReason wrote: post #10

So a price per GB today is about the same as it was in 2010. 16 year regression, wow!

sure but you also need more gb these days for various tasks so it's not 1:1

I wonder if developers will start trying to do more with less in certain areas

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#16

Post by aftbit »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #12
WithinReason wrote: post #10

So a price per GB today is about the same as it was in 2010. 16 year regression, wow!

sure but you also need more gb these days for various tasks so it's not 1:1 I wonder if developers will start trying to do more with less in certain areas

Arguably they already did with the "cloud native" systems. There were plenty of examples personally known to me in the mid and late 2010s of smaller tech companies trying to run production PostgreSQL on 8-16 GB of RAM because they didn't want to pay the cloud RAM tax. Many "cloud native" systems were designed under these (mostly artificial IMO) RAM constraints.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#17

Post by crest »

fernly wrote: post #3

Says, not inflation-adjusted. With reason; adjusting those 1960-1980 prices for inflation would make the graph a lot taller. Pricing "per GB" before 1990 is unrealistic, though; nobody thought in GB or purchased GB quantities, or conceived of GB systems. I remember a moment circa 1973 when I saw an IBM CE about to do an upgrade on a 370 system at Cal Berkeley. He had a box with several carefully-packed, large circuit…

IIRC the Cray 2 was offered in a 1GB configuration by the mid 80s.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#19

Post by abecedarius »

Dibby053 wrote: post #13

One could also blame crypto and AI (they're clearly responsible for some of the volatility in the graph), but I can see the curve flatten in the 2010s, just as Moore's law ended.

Can you blame Moore's Law ending? The graph at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law looks steady up to the 2020s.

1979 to 2009 in the OP graph has a pretty steady drop from 10^7 to 10^1 USD/GB: 6 OOMs in 30 years. Then till before the recent spike it was around 1 OOM in 15 years: 1/3 the rate of progress on a log scale.

When it comes to CPU progress we blame the end of Dennard scaling several years before the knee in this memory curve. I'd guess the story of memory is similar in also hitting technical difficulties, but I don't know.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#20

Post by gruntled-worker »

Look at it this way: while the upfront cost to scale up production is huge, prices are now high enough to justify it even if demand is expected to drop abruptly later on. So if you can wait 5 years for your next PC, 1TB RAM might go for what 64GB would have cost without the AI demand spike.

Granted, if you need a new system before then, you're SOL.

One thing to look out for is supply capacity curiously going offline in 2030 or whatever. That would hint at market power or collusion.

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