alt.hn

6/28/2026 at 6:32:53 PM

Historical memory prices 1960-2026

 https://dam.stanford.edu/memory-prices.html

by vga1

6/28/2026 at 7:32:36 PM

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 fernly

6/28/2026 at 8:35:55 PM

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.

by levocardia

6/28/2026 at 9:12:21 PM

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

by crest

6/28/2026 at 8:41:44 PM

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.

by Dibby053

6/28/2026 at 9:24:25 PM

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.

by abecedarius

6/28/2026 at 8:17:41 PM

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.

by chvid

6/28/2026 at 8:29:36 PM

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

by WithinReason

6/28/2026 at 8:39:38 PM

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

by micromacrofoot

6/28/2026 at 9:10:34 PM

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.

by aftbit

6/28/2026 at 9:09:53 PM

aaah, the 90s price crash. Good times.

by sime2009

6/28/2026 at 8:24:22 PM

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

by anonymousiam

6/28/2026 at 8:52:45 PM

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

by IshKebab

6/28/2026 at 7:55:34 PM

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

by DoctorOetker

6/28/2026 at 7:57:41 PM

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

by pixelesque

6/28/2026 at 7:48:07 PM

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 bpavuk