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Historical memory prices 1960-2026

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Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#31

Post by appreciatorBus »

H4lcyon wrote: post #29

A 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 ac…

But relative usefulness is entirely subjective, making it a meaningless unit. Depending on your use case you may need 256 GB or 0.5 GB.

The audience who would benefit from hypothetical $/usefulness would be people who don’t know what memory is and don’t know what’s inside of their computers, or what it does. This is a fine audience to be in and to serve, but obviously not the audience of that website and not HN.

If you think that audience is under served for memory market statistics, I encourage you to make such a website and serve that audience.

For people on HN, who do you know what memory is, $/GB is a fine metric.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#32

Post by [deleted] »

AbsurdCensor wrote: post #26
Retric wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#33

Post by Retric »

AbsurdCensor wrote: post #26
Retric wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lowest 2012 price listed is 3.7 (2012-10-30) vs highest listed in 2026 is 5.375 (2026-2-1), which overlaps based on the margin for error involved. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#34

Post by H4lcyon »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #31
H4lcyon wrote: post #29

A 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 ac…

But relative usefulness is entirely subjective, making it a meaningless unit. Depending on your use case you may need 256 GB or 0.5 GB. The audience who would benefit from hypothetical $/usefulness would be people who don’t know what memory is and don’t know what’s inside of their computers, or what it does. This is a fine audience to be in and to serve, but obviously not the audience of that website and not HN. If y…

This is assuming that the wide variety of use cases are evenly distributed and that larger use cases are not mostly just a lot of duplicated smaller use cases. If I have a website I will need X amount of ram. If you run a much larger website offering a comparable service you will need some multiple of X, but you don't actually need much more ram per user (assuming you're also accounting for extra infrastructure and not just the web servers). It's the same task just scaled. Relative usefulness is not subjective, you could look at a variety of tasks in different industries. Windows server 2012 had a minimum requirement of 512 MB. Windows server 2025 has a minimum requirement of 2 GB. That's 4x for the same task which totally distorts $/GBs usefulness for being able to tell you anything helpful economically. It's obviously good to collect this data, but you need to pair it with some kind of demand data for it to actually tell you anything.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#35

Post by ElFitz »

levocardia wrote: post #11
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.

I still don't get where all that memory goes.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#36

Post by appreciatorBus »

H4lcyon wrote: post #34
appreciatorBus wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But relative usefulness is entirely subjective, making it a meaningless unit. Depending on your use case you may need 256 GB or 0.5 GB. The audience who would benefit from hypothetical $/usefulness would be people who don’t know what memory is and don’t know what’s inside of their computers, or what it does. This is a fine audience to be in and to serve, but obviously not the audience of that website and not HN. If y…

This is assuming that the wide variety of use cases are evenly distributed and that larger use cases are not mostly just a lot of duplicated smaller use cases. If I have a website I will need X amount of ram. If you run a much larger website offering a comparable service you will need some multiple of X, but you don't actually need much more ram per user (assuming you're also accounting for extra infrastructure and n…

> you need to pair it with some kind of demand data for it to actually tell you anything.

Again, this is entirely dependant on who is consuming the statistic and for what purpose. For some use cases, yes demand data will be quite crucial. For others it will not. It's quite apparent the site's author doesn't see this as crucial and for the purposes I need to consider memory pricing, I agree.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#38

Post by hackernudes »

abecedarius wrote: post #19
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 kn…

I am tickled that OOM can mean "out of memory" in another context. You clearly meant "orders of magnitude".

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#39

Post by rjh29 »

bpavuk wrote: post #4

turns out things are not that bad! we just rolled back to 2010. oh, wait, now every app is a browser instance. shit. EDIT: so, how did I arrive at 2010, you ask? I looked at DDR5 pricing and found the closest pricing per GB in the past. this turned out to be DDR3 memory. I think it's totally fair since it was the latest and greatest thing back then, much like DDR5 is now. although, if we compare DDR3 to DDR3, we stil…

Yeah but now apps will have to start shaving off memory and maybe going native again. So it'll end up okay.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#40

Post by bpye »

rjh29 wrote: post #39
bpavuk wrote: post #4

turns out things are not that bad! we just rolled back to 2010. oh, wait, now every app is a browser instance. shit. EDIT: so, how did I arrive at 2010, you ask? I looked at DDR5 pricing and found the closest pricing per GB in the past. this turned out to be DDR3 memory. I think it's totally fair since it was the latest and greatest thing back then, much like DDR5 is now. although, if we compare DDR3 to DDR3, we stil…

Yeah but now apps will have to start shaving off memory and maybe going native again. So it'll end up okay.

Will they..? It seems equally (or perhaps more) likely that we'll increasingly see vibe coded browser or Electron based applications as the bar is now lower to build such a thing.
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