Historical memory prices 1960-2026

vvga1 about 3 hours ago 19 commentsRead Article on dam.stanford.edu

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fernly•about 2 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."

levocardia•about 1 hour 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.

crest•37 minutes ago

IIRC the Cray 2 was offered in a 1GB configuration by the mid 80s.

gruntled-worker•22 minutes 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.

Retric•11 minutes 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.

Dibby053•about 1 hour 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.

abecedarius•25 minutes ago

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 knee in this memory curve. I'd guess the story of memory is similar in also hitting technical difficulties, but I don't know.

chvid•about 2 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.

toofy•10 minutes 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.

Mistletoe•15 minutes ago

“All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.” -Edward Gibbon

My fellow humans, we have retrograded.

WithinReason•about 1 hour ago

So a price per GB today is about the same as it was in 2010. 16 year regression, wow!

micromacrofoot•about 1 hour 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•39 minutes 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.

anonymousiam•about 1 hour ago

It certainly doesn't look as bad as it really is when presented on a log scale chart.

IshKebab•about 1 hour ago

Going up is worse though because software has gradually got less and less memory efficient.

DoctorOetker•about 2 hours ago

is multi-level DRAM worth considering? storing multiple voltage levels per DRAM capacitor?

pixelesque•about 2 hours ago

If you care about only capacity and cost yes, but not if you care about performance.

sime2009•39 minutes ago

aaah, the 90s price crash. Good times.

bpavuk•about 2 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.