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Historical memory prices 1960-2026

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Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#111

Post by vkazanov »

MBCook wrote: post #91

Why has there been such an obvious repeating price cycle in the last 20 years? Is that due to node sizes or generations or fabs coming online or what?

Memory semis are a classical example of a cyclical industry: simulaneous capacity investments -> overproduction -> price crash -> ...

This cycle is the first one than truly breaks the trend. It seems that the industry NEVER needed thus nuch memory for this long.

Also, given the history, producers are afraid to overivest, and newer players from china are lagging behind for now.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#113

Post by dist-epoch »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #94
dist-epoch wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

do you have a reference to exact / realistic scaling laws for the leakage currents as function of capacitor/dielectric dimensions and access transistor dimensions? using 4 (or 2^N) voltage levels stores 2 (or N) bits, so we can afford to make the structures larger why would this approach make sense for NAND flash but not DRAM?

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Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#114

Post by pastage »

imtringued wrote: post #106
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…

The Cray-2 had 2GB of RAM in 1985.

So total system cost per unit of memory is going up.. 2GB costs in 1985 was $2 million (from the graph), a cray-2 was $16 million (from wikipedia). A GPU server with 8xB200 today can be had for ~$500k (estimate), 1.5TB memory is $25k (from the graph).

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#117

Post by zahlman »

markus_zhang wrote: post #68
mancerayder wrote: post #62

If my memory serves me correct (no pun intended), when I was a kid I remember bugging my mom to buy me like 2 or 4 1 MB modules, it was at least 50 bucks or 100 bucks each. Now everyone's going to talk about how cheap everything is by comparison - but someone needs to talk about how oppressively hungry browsers and OSes are compared to in the past. This is no HIMEM.SYS

I think it would be better if one has the discipline to just use older machines and play older games and only visit certain websites that can be visited on older version of browsers. A second-hand 16GB laptop can go a long way. But yeah that probably sucks from time to time, especially for young people.

> only visit certain websites that can be visited on older version of browsers. A second-hand 16GB laptop can go a long way.

My desktop has 8 and I have no problem keeping multiple tabs open using up-to-date Firefox.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#118

Post by aaron695 »

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.

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Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#119

Post by webprofusion »

The memory manufacturers have made an interesting mistake. The tech giants of the world will be working to replace them from the supply chain as soon as possible. China already makes it's own RAM albeit at 16nm but you can bet they are working to get down to 4nm.
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