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Historical memory prices 1960-2026
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- fernly 3mo agoSays, 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 boards. "So, is that a megabyte?" I asked. "Yup, that's a meg."
- levocardia 3mo agoYes, 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.
- ElFitz 3mo agoI still don't get where all that memory goes.
- microgpt 3mo agoAbstractions on abstractions on abstractions; background tasks and their abstraction stacks; increased cache and buffer sizes to take advantage of increased typical memory capacity. For an example of the latter, handling TCP on a Commodore 64 is a problem because the memory can only fit about 45 packets with nothing left over, but now you can just allocate a megabyte receive buffer per connection.
- xeromal 3mo agoFor windows 11, it seesms to be antivirus scanning. That's what's always blowing up my RAM
- skywhopper 3mo agoNeither 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.
- cryptonym 3mo agoMore than code they write, the framework and runtime they use.
- crottypeter 3mo agoLike Homer Simpson said about alcohol: "To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems", we developers can say about AI (assuming AI-assisted coding can save memory in popular programs, OSes, etc)
- cryptonym 3mo agoMostly used by JavaScript parsers and HTML rendering, the rest is for telemetry.
- noosphr 3mo agoThat's just as wrong in the opposite direction, y2k was a thing because two bytes were worth the saving in 1980, and we really needed those two bytes.
- microgpt 3mo ago[dead]
- Dylan16807 3mo agoWell it's complicated. Y2K was a combination of logic issues and the consequences of certain inefficient ways to store dates, like text and BCD. Migrating to binary could fit plenty of dates into the same space or even less. In particular, 16 bits is enough to store the entire date, year month day, from 1900 into mid 2079. Any date format that couldn't go past 1999 was probably using 24-48 bits.
- fc417fc802 3mo agoIf what you're interested in is fluctuations in production versus demand then you absolutely do not want a subjective metric. Measures of the form dollars per unit, units per watt, units per flop, etc are what you're interested in.
- __patchbit__ 3mo agoDiscussion of memory in terms of words and their bit length, time to complete a task is more meaningful to intent on use and compaction, see greycode technique. Dollars of slop a unit sacrifice skills in the industrial base for the gain of paper profits at the repeating business meetings.
- ryukoposting 3mo agoHave 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?
- gucci-on-fleek 3mo ago> 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743066
- ryukoposting 3mo agoI 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.
- aaron695 3mo ago[dead]
- crest 3mo agoIIRC the Cray 2 was offered in a 1GB configuration by the mid 80s.
- codingdave 3mo agoI wouldn't go so far as to say "nobody". Electric Boat had 2 GB memory in one of its systems at that time, with the hardware capacity to increase to 4 GB. It sounded insane at the time, but it absolutely existed, and thereby seems reasonable to include it in any research of historical pricing.
- sreekanth67 3mo agoI am curious. which year was it ? also which boat.
- mcdonje 3mo agoThe graph wouldn't be a lot taller because it's using a logarithmic scale
- rootsudo 3mo agoBack then was it 1000KB or 1024KB?
- mjevans 3mo agoThe natural unit of measure for integrated circuits is a power of 2 since that's what the systems operate in. It's so natural that early 9 and 36 bit architectures were squeezed into 8 and 32 bits as it just works so much more efficiently. Long term storage and communications? Those start to introduce things like human division of timings, frequencies, and other analog systems like rotating disks. It still generally makes sense fab actual flash chips in various powers of 2 though. The discrepancy there tends to be various forms of 'overhead' for the translation table / wear level indirection, over-provisioning, and even variations in density caused by different levels of physical cell utilization. Still, most network stuff ships around packets of 'up to' 1500 bytes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_frame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_frame and lets just exclude jumbo frames ) so arguably it'd be better to talk about all computer measures in binary powers of two, exclude the marketing huckster trying to make things more impressive by shoehorning SI engineering units into a realm that uses binary math.
- pishpash 3mo agoAlso maybe you want price per average program footprint size...
- raincole 3mo ago> 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.
- __patchbit__ 3mo ago[flagged]
- sb057 3mo agoWhat? 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.
- applicative 3mo agoGold 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.
- qingcharles 3mo agoThe 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).
- hylaride 3mo agoYou got it backwards; ending the gold standard was very much a unilateral decision by the United States because Nixon couldn't handle making politically unpopular decisions to cut spending and/or end the Vietnam war. Many countries that had their gold reserves held via US dollars were livid.
- 3mo ago
- imtringued 3mo agoThe Cray-2 had 2GB of RAM in 1985.
- pastage 3mo agoSo 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).
- sehansen 3mo agoHmm, so memory is actually still cheap compared to historical highs. At least cheap relative to other computer components.
- aaron695 3mo ago[dead]
- Tade0 3mo agoI 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.
- quietbritishjim 3mo agoThe 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.)
- toast0 3mo ago> 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.
- ralferoo 3mo agoThe 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.
- bpavuk 3mo agoturns 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 still roll back pretty far - a very close to current price was spotted in 2018, '17, 15, '13, and '11.
- rjh29 3mo agoYeah but now apps will have to start shaving off memory and maybe going native again. So it'll end up okay.
- bpye 3mo agoWill 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.
- fc417fc802 3mo agoVibe coding also lowers the barrier of maintaining multiple native pathways. Also of adopting QT instead of electron.
- bpavuk 3mo agoyeah 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.
- fc417fc802 3mo ago
- DoctorOetker 3mo agois multi-level DRAM worth considering? storing multiple voltage levels per DRAM capacitor?
- pixelesque 3mo agoIf you care about only capacity and cost yes, but not if you care about performance.
- Dylan16807 3mo agoCan you back that up with anything about semi-recent nodes? The voltages are so fragile that I'm not convinced you would actually save space once you adjust the design to handle more levels.
- dist-epoch 3mo agoIf 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.
- DoctorOetker 3mo agodo 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?
- dist-epoch 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- chvid 3mo agoYou could also do a computing pr dollar graph - which would be a similar sharp decline over the past decades - however it won’t show anything like the memory price spike of the past few years.
- anonymousiam 3mo agoIt certainly doesn't look as bad as it really is when presented on a log scale chart.
- IshKebab 3mo agoGoing up is worse though because software has gradually got less and less memory efficient.
- Gigachad 3mo agoIt'll get more efficient now people aren't upgrading. Software will be exactly as efficient as it needs to be to run on most peoples computers.
- account42 3mo agoI don't think that's true - instead software will be exactly as efficient as it needs to be to run on the developers workstations. And companies throwing sky high salaries at software developers aren't as price sensitive when it comes to those workstations as the average user.
- WithinReason 3mo agoSo a price per GB today is about the same as it was in 2010. 16 year regression, wow!
- micromacrofoot 3mo agosure but you also need more gb these days for various tasks so it's not 1:1 I wonder if developers will start trying to do more with less in certain areas
- aftbit 3mo agoArguably they already did with the "cloud native" systems. There were plenty of examples personally known to me in the mid and late 2010s of smaller tech companies trying to run production PostgreSQL on 8-16 GB of RAM because they didn't want to pay the cloud RAM tax. Many "cloud native" systems were designed under these (mostly artificial IMO) RAM constraints.
- wildzzz 3mo agoIs that because the amount of available memory is limited for a single process? You can always add more storage and storage access is relatively the same regardless of whether it comes from the SSD inside the server or sits in another rack. Storage is a pretty linear cost when you're a cloud host buying storage in the hundreds of PB numbers. Whereas for memory, if you want the whole thing, you need the whole server even if your process is light on CPU requirements.
- AbsurdCensor 3mo agoIt's not 1:1 when you consider inflation either. Ram is still cheaper when inflation is a factor.
- pron 3mo agoNominal. The inflation-adjusted price today is 2/3 of what it was then.
- Dibby053 3mo agoOne 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.
- abecedarius 3mo agoCan you blame Moore's Law ending? The graph at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law 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 knee in this memory curve. I'd guess the story of memory is similar in also hitting technical difficulties, but I don't know.
- hackernudes 3mo agoI am tickled that OOM can mean "out of memory" in another context. You clearly meant "orders of magnitude".
- abecedarius 3mo agoHeh, 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..."
- account42 3mo agoWell if you underestimate your memory requirements by orders of magnitude you'll be out of memory for sure.
- marcosdumay 3mo agoMoore's law is about transistors doubling every interval¹ *on the most economical package*. Wikipedia is misquoting it, and extraordinary expensive chips being more capable doesn't change the economical situation.
- sime2009 3mo agoaaah, the 90s price crash. Good times.
- kube-system 3mo agoWhich manufacturers quickly thereafter put to an end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- gruntled-worker 3mo agoLook at it this way: while the upfront cost to scale up production is huge, prices are now high enough to justify it even if demand is expected to drop abruptly later on. So if you can wait 5 years for your next PC, 1TB RAM might go for what 64GB would have cost without the AI demand spike. Granted, if you need a new system before then, you're SOL. One thing to look out for is supply capacity curiously going offline in 2030 or whatever. That would hint at market power or collusion.
- Retric 3mo agoMemory prices per GB were cheaper in 2012. It’s possible we’ll see a huge price drop on the near term but SSD + Cache + GPU’s seems to have changed the equation where RAM speed is considered more important than size. And from a pure architecture standpoint it makes sense.
- AbsurdCensor 3mo agoThey 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.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Retric 3mo agoLowest 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/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
- fc417fc802 3mo agoEven being vaguely in the same ballpark is a wild regression when you consider the difference in density.
- 3mo ago
- Mistletoe 3mo ago“All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.” -Edward Gibbon My fellow humans, we have retrograded.
- toofy 3mo agothis is interesting. but i’d be more interested to see a graph starting at the point when developers got their own computer. then the price of ram over time for whatever the daily functional workstation a developer would have needed then. i mean this is a graph of the price of GIGS of ram from a time period when the space shuttle needed like 1 MB.
- H4lcyon 3mo agoA 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 accomplish a useful task.
- appreciatorBus 3mo agoBut relative usefulness is entirely subjective, making it a meaningless unit. Depending on your use case you may need 256 GB or 0.5 GB. The audience who would benefit from hypothetical $/usefulness would be people who don’t know what memory is and don’t know what’s inside of their computers, or what it does. This is a fine audience to be in and to serve, but obviously not the audience of that website and not HN. If you think that audience is under served for memory market statistics, I encourage you to make such a website and serve that audience. For people on HN, who do you know what memory is, $/GB is a fine metric.
- H4lcyon 3mo agoThis is assuming that the wide variety of use cases are evenly distributed and that larger use cases are not mostly just a lot of duplicated smaller use cases. If I have a website I will need X amount of ram. If you run a much larger website offering a comparable service you will need some multiple of X, but you don't actually need much more ram per user (assuming you're also accounting for extra infrastructure and not just the web servers). It's the same task just scaled. Relative usefulness is not subjective, you could look at a variety of tasks in different industries. Windows server 2012 had a minimum requirement of 512 MB. Windows server 2025 has a minimum requirement of 2 GB. That's 4x for the same task which totally distorts $/GBs usefulness for being able to tell you anything helpful economically. It's obviously good to collect this data, but you need to pair it with some kind of demand data for it to actually tell you anything.
- appreciatorBus 3mo ago
- AllUnitConv 3mo ago[flagged]
- fHr 3mo agoDRAM and chill
- jaoks 3mo agothe problem with this analysis is that it doesn't account for memory speed, which doubles with each generation of ddr
- Fr0styMatt88 3mo agoWere we really paying more for RAM per GB in the late 2010s than we are now? Just really doesn't feel like it. Interesting.
- omgwtfbyobbq 3mo agoWe're paying more now than we paid in the late 2010s, but less than we paid in the early 2010s.
- Fr0styMatt88 3mo agoI guess ‘per GB’ doesn’t really capture it, because the base number of gigabytes available to people (ie- the smallest compatible RAM kit you need to build a computer) and the base number of gigabytes you really need (OS bloat, feeling responsive, etc) have gone up so much.
- omgwtfbyobbq 3mo agoAnd at the data center level too (AI). Not that we don't need some, but I don't see how this won't be another boom bust cycle eventually.
- kaelwd 3mo agoOnly if you're buying DDR3 now, DDR4 and DDR5 are both more expensive than the 2017 peak.
- mancerayder 3mo agoIf 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
- markus_zhang 3mo agoI 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.
- loloquwowndueo 3mo agoSecond-hand? lol my main driver has 16gb and just peachy. What do you folks do that needs so much ram to browse the web.
- pishpash 3mo agoYou can do a lot on old machines but developers also need to optimize a bit. Youtube almost plays on a 20-year-old machine, which means with some effort it'll play just fine. Most the other sites work just fine.
- ryukoposting 3mo agoMy laptop has 8 GB. I write blog posts, I have a dozen-ish tabs open, I do KiCAD things (including 3D renders!). Works great. I was doing Verilog synthesis on a similar machine in college in 2020. The truth is that, if you do the same things you were doing with your computer 10 years ago, well then you don't need a new computer! If all you do is write books, a Pentium III will do the job just as well as a brand new PC. Of course, the web throws a wrench in this. Word 2003 is still far more capable than Google Docs, yet tons of people opt for the cloud slop because it's convenient and free-as-in-beer. And, Google Docs will continue to become less efficient with time.
- linzhangrun 3mo agoNote that the chart scales by powers of 10
- jagged-chisel 3mo agoSo, it’s on a logarithmic scale
- bilsbie 3mo agoIt’s weird to see supply and demand battle moores law.
- altairprime 3mo agoUnfortunately, this is unadjusted prices, and this failed to annotate where the cartel years and when the cartel was 'broken up'. Not a bad assignment's work but clearly lacking the domain awareness necessary to report the complete story through graphs.
- SilverSlash 3mo agoThis is extremely misleading and not very useful. It makes little sense to use pricing per GB during decades when RAM was at most in MBs. In that case, why not talk about price per TB or PB? Then the line will look pretty much flat and horizontal.
- muvlon 3mo agoThe line would look the exact same if you switched it to price per PB. Only the labels on the y-axis would change.
- jldugger 3mo agoTIL someone took over the now defunct jcmit dataset[1] (archive[2]). I expected his dataset to die off when his website did, but I guess someone found the data dump on archive.org and revived it. Which raises a question: how will this dataset fare five years from now? [1]: https://www.jcmit.com/mem2010.htm https://www.jcmit.com/mem2010.htm [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250716092935/https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20250716092935/https://jcmit.net...
- TimXare 3mo agoThe dataset about memory prices now has a memory preservation problem. Very meta.
- TimXare 3mo ago[dead]
- JumpCrisscross 3mo agoDo we have a chart of memory production per year? (Are any large expansions, by incumbents or new entrants, planned for the near term?)
- SirMaster 3mo agoI knew I paid more per GB in 2018 for DDR4 than even today's inflated prices of DDR5...
- MBCook 3mo agoWhy 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?
- veqq 3mo agoCyclical industries are very common.
- vkazanov 3mo agoMemory 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.
- initramfs 3mo agoExcept no one was buying 1 Trillion $ for a GB of RAM in 1960. Even Professor Frink would agree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykxMqtuM6Ko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykxMqtuM6Ko
- mwkaufma 3mo ago"on a galactic timescale, the prices haven't risen at all..."
- yashthakker 3mo ago[flagged]
- fleebee 3mo agoIn the first graph, if you hover over the DRAM line you'll notice that the most recent data points are for DDR3. One of the data points from 2025 is a 2 GB stick. This paints a more rosy picture than the situation deserves.
- glouwbug 3mo agoUsefulness per gigabyte should be taken into account too. We could do way more with 32MB in the 90s than 4GB today
- latentframe 3mo agoIt's amazing how consistently thr lower memory cost have expanded the set of economic viable applications : cheaper hardware doesn't just improve existing software it also enables software that was not possible before
- meindnoch 3mo ago>it also enables software that was not possible before Which is not always a good thing.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- beAbU 3mo agoNice to know we still have a ways to go till 1960s pricing!
- londons_explore 3mo agoWould be nice to have hard drives on the same chart
- halamadrid 3mo agoThis 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.
- lossyalgo 3mo agoThe 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?
- loadcurve 3mo ago[dead]
- webprofusion 3mo agoThe 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.
- nok22kon 3mo agowhat makes you think China RAM makers will sell their chips at the old memory prices and not just 10% below the current market price
- Schlagbohrer 3mo agoChina 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.
- Hamuko 3mo agoMore 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.
- sehansen 3mo agoDRAM hit a barrier at 10 nm a few years ago[0], so 16 nm is actually even closer to state-of-the-art. E.g. Micron newest node (1-γ) is their sixth at 10 nm [1] and their first EUV-based node. The problem is that DRAM is fundamentally based on storing charge in a capacitor and how much charge a capacitor can store is a result of the geometry of the capacitor. So either someone will have to figure out a way to make the same size capacitor take up less space on the RAM chip (this is what broke the previous 20 nm barrier) or someone will have to invent a practical way of making RAM with less than 1 capacitor per bit. 0: https://semiengineering.com/dram-scaling-challenges-grow/ https://semiengineering.com/dram-scaling-challenges-grow/ 1: https://www.techpowerup.com/333111/micron-announces-shipment-of-1g-1-gamma-dram-companys-first-euv-memory-node https://www.techpowerup.com/333111/micron-announces-shipment...
- zahlman 3mo agoTIL about "HBM".
- helterskelter 3mo agoAt this rate somebody's going to get killed over three megabytes of hot RAM any day now.
- Schlagbohrer 3mo agoThis 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.
- PowerElectronix 3mo agoThis 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".
- drob518 3mo agoWell, that was depressing.
- alentred 3mo agoWith respect... I am surprised such a low-quality analysis is published on stanford.edu . What is compared here? What is the purpose of this? What are the conclusions of the analysis? Heck, where is the analysis? By what logic are the prices per GB(!) comparable between 1960(!) and 2026? I am sorry to being rude, I just don't understand this publishing beyond getting the media exposure.
- 6thbit 3mo agoLikely your expectations are mismatched because this is just data and not an analysis.
- arter45 3mo agoLet f(t) be the price of RAM per GB from 1960 to 2026. Let F(t) be the price of RAM per byte in the same period. At every point in time t, f(t) is the price per 1 GB of RAM which is 1GB/1B times the price per byte of RAM. Because 1GB/1B is non-zero, it follows that f(t)=1GB/1B F(t). It also follows that ratios are preserved, ie f(t1)/f(t2)= 1GB/1B F(t1)/F(t2) As long as f(t2) is non-zero, which in this context is never the case. Visually, the two graphs are the same except scale is different.
- dominicrose 3mo agoThe log scale is nice to compare decades. Wether it's inflation-adjusted or not isn't too important but it's still a factor of 10, which would show in a linear recent graph. The fact that we're comparing GBs instead of the average RAM stick shows how much the price has decreased per GB rather than per unit (much smaller decrease). But a linear graph that represents only the last decade and where the bottom is 0 (not the min value) would tell a different story, but I guess we already know that story because we're living it.
- quentindanjou 3mo agoThere is something wrong with these graphs: they indicate nand price to be back to 2020 level but in 2020 I got nand for half the current price.
- tonymet 3mo agothis should really show average install cost. Even phones have 8-12gb because the software is so atrocious. It would be like comparing cars by pricing per horsepower. Nobody is running a 12 horsepower vehicle on the highway, and doing so would be dangerous because of the change in average power & speed.
- smugma 3mo agoTim Cook recently likened memory prices to a "hundred year flood." Looking here, it looks like 1988 was at least as bad, with prices going up 3X+ from $160/MB to $500/MB.