Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Historical memory prices 1960-2026

dam.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 175 posts

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#151

Post by ajross »

raincole wrote: post #88
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…

> adjusting those 1960-1980 prices for inflation would make the graph a lot taller. It won't though. One dollar in 1960 is just about ten dollars today. The graph is already in logarithmic scale so it won't make much difference.

Depressing to see how much discussion on HN (!!) has resulted from a objectively terrible graph reading. I mean... in the process of our infiltration by finance bros and VC money, have we genuinely forgotten how exponentials work?

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#152

Post by abecedarius »

hackernudes wrote: post #38
abecedarius wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am tickled that OOM can mean "out of memory" in another context. You clearly meant "orders of magnitude".

Heh, unintentional. Another term shorter than spelling out "orders of magnitude" is "decades", but I figure that's less familiar and even more confusing here. "Memory price started out falling two decades per decade..."

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#153

Post by Hamuko »

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

More competition will drive down the market price, so it'll be 10% below a price that is lower than what we have currently. Obviously it's not gonna go down immediately, but more supply will definitely bring down prices.

Obviously, this is very bad for the existing memory makers, since these boom prices will not last forever, and the Chinese aren't gonna stop selling memory once they are in the market.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#154

Post by ralferoo »

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…

The problem with "price per typical-sized RAM chip as sold at the time" is not so much that it's subjective, but you'd get artificial spikes in the data.

For me, the key take home from the graph as stands is that price per GB right now is about the same as 2020. That seems reasonable, it's more expensive than it was, but only outrageous if you forget what it was like only a short while ago.

But back in 2020, 4GB or 8GB sticks were most common, a few years ago it was up to 8GB, 16GB or 32GB, and now 2x8GB seems to be the most common high-end configuration or 2x4GB for low-end again. If you'd jumped from 8GB sticks to 32GB sticks and back again, it would seem like there was a spike up around 2021-2 and that memory was cheaper now than a few years ago.

I think the main driver for the data is that probably consumers or the market decides on a reasonable price for memory, and people buy whatever they can get for that money. When I had a Z80 computer in the mid 80s, 64KB expansion RAM was about £100. For a similar computer but a few years earlier, a 32KB expansion RAM was about the same price. When I had an Amiga in the early 90s, a 512KB expansion RAM was again around the same price. In the 2000s, a couple of MB was around the same price. Maybe 5 years ago, the market was split a bit and a 4GB RAM was around £60 and 8GB around £120, but maybe this reflects "under $100" as the ideal target. A few years ago, it was similar but 8GB for around £80 and 16GB for around £160, now it's "doubled" in price, it's just back to 8GB for £120 again. But whatever the decade, it seems people are prepared to spend about £100 on memory for an average PC.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#155

Post by applicative »

sb057 wrote: post #110
__patchbit__ wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What? Gold underwent a massive revaluation with the end of Bretton Woods in 1971. It was prior to then that government were actively involved in making the price of gold artificially low. Fun fact: under 31 U.S. Code § 5117 a troy ounce of gold is still valued at 42 and 2/9ths dollars.

Gold became much ‘cheaper’ in the period 1945-70 because there was a series of technical revolutions in South Africa mining (never mind the apartheid …) This is why Breton Woods lasted as long as it did.

The countries like France that conspired in resentment to break it as ‘privilege’ are now effectively in flames.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#156

Post by ryukoposting »

gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #131
ryukoposting wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]:…

I remember installing Windows 10 on my laptop when I was in high school, it was a decommissioned Thinkpad T410s from my dad's work. 4GB of RAM, Nehalem i5, a very early consumer SSD (OCZ, if I recall). I vividly remember my first thought being "wow this is really slow." Win7 ran like a champ on that machine.

My experience with Win10 on that laptop actually led me to buy a dumb gamer laptop for college. As those all do, it died prematurely, so I ended up back on the T410s for a while. I put KDE Neon on it. It was great!

If you're saying that you can install and use Win10 on a laptop with 1 GB of RAM, well yes I acknowledge that is true. But it's a purely academic exercise, it's not actually a usable computer for the overwhelming majority of people.

Maybe it would have been fine for my grandma. She was using a Pentium II running Windows XP to go on Facebook in the early 2010s.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#157

Post by ack_complete »

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?

Some tasks simply require more RAM. Compiling big software, for instance, wants as many CPU cores as it can get, and each compiler instance needs some amount of RAM to run efficiently. It's not unusual for a 32-core build to need 32-64GB of RAM to run at full speed. Work on a smaller program, though, and 16GB is absolutely fine.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#158

Post by qingcharles »

sb057 wrote: post #110
__patchbit__ wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What? Gold underwent a massive revaluation with the end of Bretton Woods in 1971. It was prior to then that government were actively involved in making the price of gold artificially low. Fun fact: under 31 U.S. Code § 5117 a troy ounce of gold is still valued at 42 and 2/9ths dollars.

The right to a civil jury trial in the 7th Amend. to the US Constitution is only available where the value in controversy exceeds twenty dollars (a massive sum in 1791, and a trifle now).

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#160

Post by tancop »

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?

[dead]
Post reply on HN