At this rate somebody's going to get killed over three megabytes of hot RAM any day now.
Historical memory prices 1960-2026
121–130 of 175 posts
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#122The 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.
what makes you think China RAM makers will sell their chips at the old memory prices and not just 10% below the current market price
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#123Earlier 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.
Neither do the developers, because until recently, RAM was so cheap it didn’t matter, and we were in a situation where almost no one ever needed to consider “how much RAM will this take?” when writing code.
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#124Says, 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 once held in my hand the main part of a ferrite core memory module from the early 70s. It was kilobytes at best.
I also recall looking at recommended requirements for Dungeon Keeper 2 - 266MHz CPU, 64MB RAM and thinking "that's absurd - no such device exists!". I was a kid back then, so what did I know?
Later on in college a friend showed us his absolute monster of a laptop with a whopping 8GB of RAM - he could spin up several VMs on one device! Groundbreaking on a (nominally) portable device.
So yeah, safe to say the notion of gigabytes of RAM anywhere close to a regular person belongs firmly to the 21st century.
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#125This graph is the touchstone one should rub all the "RAM and storage are no longer a commodity" bs that micron, sk hynix, samsung, western digital, seagate and others are peddling as of late while the valuation of their companies have gone from "supplier of widely available fungible goods" to "state-of-the-art moat AI backbone tecnology".
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#126This is probably the first real thing that is affecting me personally with this whole AI business. Having to pay more for device upgrades going forward. I hope the demand settles or new memory production offsets the demand.
The truly absurd part is that datacenters are barely being built and those that are built can't be turned on because they don't have enough power. Satya Nadella admitted recently that they have warehouses full of unused hardware because they a) can't get datacenters built and b) don't have enough power i.e. this whole RAM scandal is a bloody joke. If OpenAI goes bust (their financials are a huge mess and lots of red flags - they might not even survive to IPO!) and then what will happen to all those "inked" deals to buy all that RAM?
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#127Says, 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 author clearly wasn't implying that these were 1GB chips. They just wanted to show a graph scaled per unit of memory. It could just as well have been per byte, and the graph would've been identical but the values on the left would be changed by a factor of a billion.
You could argue that you'd rather see a "price per typical-sized RAM chip as sold at the time". That would also be a perfectly valid thing to graph (though a bit more subjective), but it doesn't invalidate this one. Since per byte (or GB or whatever you want to say) has continued downward all this time, it makes the recent spike all the more notable.
(I'm not sure it's right to label vacuum tubes and core memory as "DRAM" though.)
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Hmm, so memory is actually still cheap compared to historical highs. At least cheap relative to other computer components.
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#129If 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
There’s been a sharp divergence in memory requirements. Talk to developers and they think that 32GB is the bare minimum these days, with 64GB or more preferred. They’ll point to Electron and Chrome tabs and everything else. Then you sit down with an average computer user on their 8GB RAM MacBook Neo and they’re in love with how fast and smooth it is, even with their chrome tabs and the company Slack up and Spotify in…
How do you explain this discrepancy? Is it because the OS is agressively fencing in and pruning these wasteful software?
Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you are trying to compare the lowest with the highest and not the current price. RUn that number with the current price.
The most recent price listed is from a month ago and the prior prices are increasing. So really you can roughly compare years but not Today. There’s plenty of data to say prices in 2012 and 2016 overlap, which is wild.
It's crazy that a AAA video game cost $60 when I was a child in the 90s and costs $60 today, sticker price! Not adjusted for inflation!