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Historical memory prices 1960-2026

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Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#41

Post by tbrownaw »

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…

> The unit needs to be tied to the relative usefulness for its time.

That requires baking in assumptions, and makes the data less general.

You can go from $/gb to $/usefulness fairly trivially by adding assumptions, but you can't go the other way.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#42

Post by noosphr »

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.

That's just as wrong in the opposite direction, y2k was a thing because two bytes were worth the saving in 1980, and we really needed those two bytes.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#43

Post by wildzzz »

aftbit wrote: post #16
micromacrofoot wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that because the amount of available memory is limited for a single process? You can always add more storage and storage access is relatively the same regardless of whether it comes from the SSD inside the server or sits in another rack. Storage is a pretty linear cost when you're a cloud host buying storage in the hundreds of PB numbers. Whereas for memory, if you want the whole thing, you need the whole server even if your process is light on CPU requirements.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#44

Post by fc417fc802 »

gruntled-worker wrote: post #20

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…

> 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.

Given the nature of the industry and how critical the product is I think it would make more sense for governments to bankroll fab construction in a way that the public takes on the risk of consumer prices falling below a certain level within some limited timeframe. Mildly subsidized chip production seems like a much better downside than the current sky high prices.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#45

Post by microgpt »

noosphr wrote: post #42
levocardia wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's just as wrong in the opposite direction, y2k was a thing because two bytes were worth the saving in 1980, and we really needed those two bytes.

[dead]

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#46

Post by microgpt »

ElFitz wrote: post #35
levocardia wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Abstractions on abstractions on abstractions; background tasks and their abstraction stacks; increased cache and buffer sizes to take advantage of increased typical memory capacity. For an example of the latter, handling TCP on a Commodore 64 is a problem because the memory can only fit about 45 packets with nothing left over, but now you can just allocate a megabyte receive buffer per connection.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#47

Post by fc417fc802 »

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.

If what you're interested in is fluctuations in production versus demand then you absolutely do not want a subjective metric. Measures of the form dollars per unit, units per watt, units per flop, etc are what you're interested in.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#48

Post by fc417fc802 »

Retric wrote: post #33
AbsurdCensor wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Even being vaguely in the same ballpark is a wild regression when you consider the difference in density.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#50

Post by fc417fc802 »

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.

Moore's law didn't end in any broad sense and certainly not that far back. It's a tiring piece of misinformation that just won't die.

Progress has consistently become more difficult (ie more expensive) but has generally kept up. The scaling of a couple specific technologies noticably slowed down a few years back but that's not the general case.

The node names aren't representative of the reality.

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