Historical memory prices 1960-2026
dam.stanford.edu
dam.stanford.edu
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
And yes, RAM demand goes up with the average RAM in computers but it does lag and it's not yet clear if it will go down with increasing ram prices as IT corporations can still afford the more expensive RAM needed for the developers to run the RAM-hungry applications they need to run, which means they won't be dogfooding their software in a normal budget user environment and are less motivated to optimize for a reasonably priced amount of RAM.
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
But yeah that probably sucks from time to time, especially for young people.
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.
My desktop has 8 and I have no problem keeping multiple tabs open using up-to-date Firefox.
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.
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.
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.
There’s plenty of data to say prices in 2012 and 2016 overlap, which is wild.
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.
[1]: https://www.jcmit.com/mem2010.htm [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250716092935/https://jcmit.net...
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.
I wonder if developers will start trying to do more with less in certain areas
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.
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.
Is that due to node sizes or generations or fabs coming online or what?
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.
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.
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.
That doesn't apply so long as you are willing to accept the LGPL. In practice that means you can statically link everything except QT so that the end user is free to drop in a modified QT version if he would like.
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.
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/
1: https://www.techpowerup.com/333111/micron-announces-shipment...
Which is not always a good thing.
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?
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.
We don't _need_ that much ram, we just found new things to do with more.
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.
Just really doesn't feel like it. Interesting.
Edit: Actually Johnny Mnemonic had 325MB in his head and he had the whole Yakuza out to kill him.
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.
I am sorry to being rude, I just don't understand this publishing beyond getting the media exposure.
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.