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fernly 7 hours ago [-]
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 boards. "So, is that a megabyte?" I asked. "Yup, that's a meg."
codingdave 5 hours ago [-]
I 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.
levocardia 6 hours ago [-]
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.
fc417fc802 3 hours ago [-]
If 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.
ElFitz 4 hours ago [-]
I still don't get where all that memory goes.
xeromal 17 minutes ago [-]
For windows 11, it seesms to be antivirus scanning. That's what's always blowing up my RAM
microgpt 3 hours ago [-]
Abstractions 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.
noosphr 3 hours ago [-]
That'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.
Dylan16807 60 minutes ago [-]
Well 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.
microgpt 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
pishpash 8 minutes ago [-]
Also maybe you want price per average program footprint size...
mcdonje 2 hours ago [-]
The graph wouldn't be a lot taller because it's using a logarithmic scale
rootsudo 2 hours ago [-]
Back then was it 1000KB or 1024KB?
mjevans 2 hours ago [-]
The 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 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.
crest 5 hours ago [-]
IIRC the Cray 2 was offered in a 1GB configuration by the mid 80s.
mancerayder 2 hours ago [-]
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
Aurornis 26 minutes ago [-]
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 the background.
I still have an older 8GB machine to kick around with on the go when I don’t want to haul the expensive laptop. It’s fine, even for a lot of development.
markus_zhang 1 hours ago [-]
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.
loloquwowndueo 1 hours ago [-]
Second-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 5 minutes ago [-]
You 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.
gruntled-worker 5 hours ago [-]
Look 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.
fc417fc802 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Given the nature of the industry and how critical the product is I think it would make more sense for governments to bankroll fab construction in a way that the public takes on the risk of consumer prices falling below a certain level within some limited timeframe. Mildly subsidized chip production seems like a much better downside than the current sky high prices.
Retric 5 hours ago [-]
Memory 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 5 hours ago [-]
They 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.
Retric 4 hours ago [-]
Lowest 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/
AbsurdCensor 2 hours ago [-]
So you are trying to compare the lowest with the highest and not the current price. RUn that number with the current price.
fc417fc802 3 hours ago [-]
Even being vaguely in the same ballpark is a wild regression when you consider the difference in density.
4 hours ago [-]
altairprime 43 minutes ago [-]
Unfortunately, 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.
Dibby053 6 hours ago [-]
One 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.
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.
marcosdumay 2 hours ago [-]
Moore'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.
hackernudes 3 hours ago [-]
I am tickled that OOM can mean "out of memory" in another context. You clearly meant "orders of magnitude".
fc417fc802 3 hours ago [-]
Moore's law didn't end in any broad sense and certainly not that far back. It's a tiring piece of misinformation that just won't die.
Progress has consistently become more difficult (ie more expensive) but has generally kept up. The scaling of a couple specific technologies noticably slowed down a few years back but that's not the general case.
The node names aren't representative of the reality.
Fr0styMatt88 2 hours ago [-]
Were 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 14 minutes ago [-]
We're paying more now than we paid in the late 2010s, but less than we paid in the early 2010s.
bpavuk 7 hours ago [-]
turns 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 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah but now apps will have to start shaving off memory and maybe going native again. So it'll end up okay.
bpye 3 hours ago [-]
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.
fc417fc802 3 hours ago [-]
Vibe coding also lowers the barrier of maintaining multiple native pathways. Also of adopting QT instead of electron.
Gigachad 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
AbsurdCensor 2 hours ago [-]
Except you didn't when you consider the prices aren't adjusted for inflation.
5 hours ago [-]
bilsbie 2 hours ago [-]
It’s weird to see supply and demand battle moores law.
linzhangrun 2 hours ago [-]
Note that the chart scales by powers of 10
jagged-chisel 41 minutes ago [-]
So, it’s on a logarithmic scale
WithinReason 6 hours ago [-]
So a price per GB today is about the same as it was in 2010. 16 year regression, wow!
Aurornis 4 hours ago [-]
Drawing a line backward from today's high water mark only goes back to 2018.
2010 prices were significantly higher.
The chart is also not inflation adjusted, which would bring the equivalent date forward even further.
Nowhere near a 16 year regression.
pron 5 hours ago [-]
Nominal. The inflation-adjusted price today is 2/3 of what it was then.
micromacrofoot 6 hours ago [-]
sure 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 5 hours ago [-]
Arguably 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 3 hours ago [-]
Is 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 5 hours ago [-]
It's not 1:1 when you consider inflation either. Ram is still cheaper when inflation is a factor.
DoctorOetker 7 hours ago [-]
is multi-level DRAM worth considering? storing multiple voltage levels per DRAM capacitor?
pixelesque 7 hours ago [-]
If you care about only capacity and cost yes, but not if you care about performance.
dist-epoch 5 hours ago [-]
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.
chvid 6 hours ago [-]
You 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.
7 hours ago [-]
anonymousiam 6 hours ago [-]
It certainly doesn't look as bad as it really is when presented on a log scale chart.
IshKebab 6 hours ago [-]
Going up is worse though because software has gradually got less and less memory efficient.
Gigachad 15 minutes ago [-]
It'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.
7 hours ago [-]
sime2009 5 hours ago [-]
aaah, the 90s price crash. Good times.
kube-system 3 hours ago [-]
Which manufacturers quickly thereafter put to an end:
the problem with this analysis is that it doesn't account for memory speed, which doubles with each generation of ddr
Mistletoe 5 hours ago [-]
“All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.” -Edward Gibbon
My fellow humans, we have retrograded.
toofy 5 hours ago [-]
this 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.
fHr 3 hours ago [-]
DRAM and chill
AllUnitConv 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
H4lcyon 5 hours ago [-]
A 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 4 hours ago [-]
But 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 4 hours ago [-]
This 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 4 hours ago [-]
> you need to pair it with some kind of demand data for it to actually tell you anything.
Again, this is entirely dependant on who is consuming the statistic and for what purpose. For some use cases, yes demand data will be quite crucial. For others it will not. It's quite apparent the site's author doesn't see this as crucial and for the purposes I need to consider memory pricing, I agree.
tbrownaw 3 hours ago [-]
> The unit needs to be tied to the relative usefulness for its time.
That requires baking in assumptions, and makes the data less general.
You can go from $/gb to $/usefulness fairly trivially by adding assumptions, but you can't go the other way.
Gigachad 3 hours ago [-]
A useful task isn't a fixed thing though. Everything the 2012 computer did you can still do today with the same amount of ram we had back then.
RachelF 2 hours ago [-]
No, not if it involves a web browser. Most web sites today will not work on a 2012 web browser.
The PC stopped existing in isolation, for most useful tasks now, it needs an Internet connection.
ssl-3 51 minutes ago [-]
I use a Thinkpad T530 for reasons that are very important to me. It is the only laptop that I have, so it is what I use for every manner of portable computing.
It still does all the things I want it to do, including using modern websites with modern browsers on modern operating systems (including Windows 11).
The T530 was released in June of 2012.
Gigachad 2 hours ago [-]
The 2012 computer running a modern linux install will still work fine. I'm talking more about the specs, specifically memory. I had 8gb of ram in my computer in 2012, the Macbook Neo released this year still has 8gb and is usable for modern day tasks.
We don't _need_ that much ram, we just found new things to do with more.
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."
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.
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 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.
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
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 the background.
I still have an older 8GB machine to kick around with on the go when I don’t want to haul the expensive laptop. It’s fine, even for a lot of development.
But yeah that probably sucks from time to time, especially for young people.
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.
Given the nature of the industry and how critical the product is I think it would make more sense for governments to bankroll fab construction in a way that the public takes on the risk of consumer prices falling below a certain level within some limited timeframe. Mildly subsidized chip production seems like a much better downside than the current sky high prices.
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.
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.
Wikipedia is misquoting it, and extraordinary expensive chips being more capable doesn't change the economical situation.
Progress has consistently become more difficult (ie more expensive) but has generally kept up. The scaling of a couple specific technologies noticably slowed down a few years back but that's not the general case.
The node names aren't representative of the reality.
Just really doesn't feel like it. Interesting.
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.
2010 prices were significantly higher.
The chart is also not inflation adjusted, which would bring the equivalent date forward even further.
Nowhere near a 16 year regression.
I wonder if developers will start trying to do more with less in certain areas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
My fellow humans, we have retrograded.
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.
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.
Again, this is entirely dependant on who is consuming the statistic and for what purpose. For some use cases, yes demand data will be quite crucial. For others it will not. It's quite apparent the site's author doesn't see this as crucial and for the purposes I need to consider memory pricing, I agree.
That requires baking in assumptions, and makes the data less general.
You can go from $/gb to $/usefulness fairly trivially by adding assumptions, but you can't go the other way.
The PC stopped existing in isolation, for most useful tasks now, it needs an Internet connection.
It still does all the things I want it to do, including using modern websites with modern browsers on modern operating systems (including Windows 11).
The T530 was released in June of 2012.
We don't _need_ that much ram, we just found new things to do with more.