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Historical memory prices 1960-2026

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Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#131

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

ryukoposting wrote: post #105
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.

Have you ever actually tried using Windows 10 with 1GB of RAM? I wouldn't consider it suitable for "standard computing tasks." And that's the hangup, what do you consider a "standard computing task?" On what OS? Running what software? How well? Plenty of people were still using XP in 2009, so is 256 MB of RAM okay for "standard computing tasks" in 2009?

> Have you ever actually tried using Windows 10 with 1GB of RAM? I wouldn't consider it suitable for "standard computing tasks."

I have [0], and it's actually not quite as bad as you would expect. It certainly wasn't fast, but I had no problem using it for basic web browsing and document editing. The painfully slow hard drive and processor speeds on that computer actually caused more issues than the lack of RAM.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743066

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#132

Post by master_crab »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #129
Aurornis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Containers is often the reason. You start a container and you are immediately pulling in a quarter to half a gig or more (often the latter).

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#133

Post by Schlagbohrer »

nok22kon wrote: post #122
webprofusion wrote: post #119

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.

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

China often exhibits tremendous internal market competition, so it's possible that different Chinese suppliers will race each other to the bottom (Chinese firms are really good at suriving on ultra-thin margins) making prices even lower than 10% below the premium providers.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#134

Post by Schlagbohrer »

helterskelter wrote: post #121

At this rate somebody's going to get killed over three megabytes of hot RAM any day now.

This post had me wracking my brain asking, "Did any of Gibson's books have someone get mugged for some hot RAM?"

Edit: Actually Johnny Mnemonic had 325MB in his head and he had the whole Yakuza out to kill him.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#135

Post by bpavuk »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #51
bpye wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vibe coding also lowers the barrier of maintaining multiple native pathways. Also of adopting QT instead of electron.

yeah but you also have commercial licensing with Qt specifically :))

or we are going to see an explosion of vibe-coded GPL apps.

anyhow, the likes of Linear and Notion ain't gonna abandon web and go Qt. or!! if we are very lucky, we can see a native app framework that ticks all the boxes of a modern UI framework and is permissively licensed, but we need this crunch to stay there for years.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#136

Post by pmontra »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #129
Aurornis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because they use one or two apps at at time, the ones they must spend all their time to perform their job. E.g. Excel and a web app to work on invoices and a stack of paper documents. I see 8 GB on Windows PCs too.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#137

Post by fc417fc802 »

bpavuk wrote: post #135
fc417fc802 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vibe coding also lowers the barrier of maintaining multiple native pathways. Also of adopting QT instead of electron.

yeah but you also have commercial licensing with Qt specifically :)) or we are going to see an explosion of vibe-coded GPL apps. anyhow, the likes of Linear and Notion ain't gonna abandon web and go Qt. or!! if we are very lucky, we can see a native app framework that ticks all the boxes of a modern UI framework and is permissively licensed, but we need this crunch to stay there for years.

> you also have commercial licensing with Qt

That doesn't apply so long as you are willing to accept the LGPL. In practice that means you can statically link everything except QT so that the end user is free to drop in a modified QT version if he would like.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#139

Post by toast0 »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #127
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 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…

> I'm not sure it's right to label vacuum tubes and core memory as "DRAM" though.

Core memory does need a refresh after a read, but since it doesn't need refreshing otherwise, I'd mark it as SRAM.

Williams tube memories seem DRAM like enough to me though.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#140

Post by cryptonym »

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.

Mostly used by JavaScript parsers and HTML rendering, the rest is for telemetry.
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