“All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.” -Edward Gibbon
My fellow humans, we have retrograded.
Historical memory prices 1960-2026
21–30 of 175 posts
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#22Look 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…
Memory prices per GB were cheaper in 2012.
It’s possible we’ll see a huge price drop on the near term but SSD + Cache + GPU’s seems to have changed the equation where RAM speed is considered more important than size. And from a pure architecture standpoint it makes sense.
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#23this is interesting. but i’d be more interested to see a graph starting at the point when developers got their own computer.
then the price of ram over time for whatever the daily functional workstation a developer would have needed then.
i mean this is a graph of the price of GIGS of ram from a time period when the space shuttle needed like 1 MB.
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#24So a price per GB today is about the same as it was in 2010. 16 year regression, wow!
Nominal. The inflation-adjusted price today is 2/3 of what it was then.
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#25Says, 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…
I wouldn't go so far as to say "nobody". Electric Boat had 2 GB memory in one of its systems at that time, with the hardware capacity to increase to 4 GB. It sounded insane at the time, but it absolutely existed, and thereby seems reasonable to include it in any research of historical pricing.
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#26Look 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…
Memory prices per GB were cheaper in 2012. It’s possible we’ll see a huge price drop on the near term but SSD + Cache + GPU’s seems to have changed the equation where RAM speed is considered more important than size. And from a pure architecture standpoint it makes sense.
They weren't though when you adjust for inflation. If you took inflation into account, ram is cheaper now by $0.89/GB for DRAM compared to 2012.
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#27So 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
It's not 1:1 when you consider inflation either. Ram is still cheaper when inflation is a factor.
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#28is multi-level DRAM worth considering? storing multiple voltage levels per DRAM capacitor?
If it were possible, it would have been done already. The issue is the capacitors are already tiny, and barely can prevent a single bit decaying before refresh.
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#29A perfect example of how graphs are often misleading. $/GB is a totally useless unit value because it's an arbitrary size. The unit needs to be tied to the relative usefulness for its time. The y axis should be something like $/average workstation memory or $/requirement for common compute task. It's obvious that ram is expensive right now, but it's not expensive per GB. It's expensive relative to what you need to accomplish a useful task.
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#30So a price per GB today is about the same as it was in 2010. 16 year regression, wow!
Drawing a line backward from today's high water mark only goes back to 2018.
2010 prices were significantly higher.
The chart is also not inflation adjusted, which would bring the equivalent date forward even further.
Nowhere near a 16 year regression.