- 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."
by mancerayder
2 subcomments
- 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
by gruntled-worker
2 subcomments
- 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.
by dominicrose
0 subcomment
- The 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.
- TIL 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
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250716092935/https://jcmit.net...
- In 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.
by WithinReason
3 subcomments
- So a price per GB today is about the same as it was in 2010. 16 year regression, wow!
- 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.
- Why 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?
by PowerElectronix
0 subcomment
- This 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".
by webprofusion
2 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by altairprime
0 subcomment
- 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.
by latentframe
1 subcomments
- It'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
by quentindanjou
0 subcomment
- There 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.
- Tim 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.
by JumpCrisscross
0 subcomment
- Do we have a chart of memory production per year? (Are any large expansions, by incumbents or new entrants, planned for the near term?)
by halamadrid
1 subcomments
- This 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.
by DoctorOetker
2 subcomments
- is multi-level DRAM worth considering? storing multiple voltage levels per DRAM capacitor?
by londons_explore
0 subcomment
- Would be nice to have hard drives on the same chart
- 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.
- aaah, the 90s price crash. Good times.
- Usefulness per gigabyte should be taken into account too. We could do way more with 32MB in the 90s than 4GB today
- 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.
by helterskelter
1 subcomments
- At this rate somebody's going to get killed over three megabytes of hot RAM any day now.
by Fr0styMatt88
2 subcomments
- 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.
- I knew I paid more per GB in 2018 for DDR4 than even today's inflated prices of DDR5...
- “All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.” -Edward Gibbon
My fellow humans, we have retrograded.
by anonymousiam
1 subcomments
- It certainly doesn't look as bad as it really is when presented on a log scale chart.
- Nice to know we still have a ways to go till 1960s pricing!
by SilverSlash
1 subcomments
- This 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.
- It’s weird to see supply and demand battle moores law.
by linzhangrun
1 subcomments
- Note that the chart scales by powers of 10
- Well, that was depressing.
- TIL about "HBM".
- Except 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
- the problem with this analysis is that it doesn't account for memory speed, which doubles with each generation of ddr
- 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.
- this 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.
by yashthakker
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
by AllUnitConv
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
- [dead]
- [dead]
- "on a galactic timescale, the prices haven't risen at all..."
- DRAM and chill
- With 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.
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