51–60 of 175 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
aaah, the 90s price crash. Good times.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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/
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…
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…
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…
Wikipedia is misquoting it, and extraordinary expensive chips being more capable doesn't change the economical situation.
Just really doesn't feel like it. Interesting.