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- Hacker News
- 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.by webprofusion
- what makes you think China RAM makers will sell their chips at the old memory prices and not just 10% below the current market priceby nok22kon
- DRAM hit a barrier at 10 nm a few years ago[0], so 16 nm is actually even closer to state-of-the-art. E.g. Micron newest node (1-γ) is their sixth at 10 nm [1] and their first EUV-based node.
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...
by sehansen - 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 - Except you didn't when you consider the prices aren't adjusted for inflation.by AbsurdCensor
- Yeah but now apps will have to start shaving off memory and maybe going native again. So it'll end up okay.by rjh29
- 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".
- 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 MBCook - Cyclical industries are very common.by veqq
- Memory semis are a classical example of a cyclical industry: simulaneous capacity investments -> overproduction -> price crash -> ...
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.
by vkazanov - 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
- 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.
by fc417fc802 - 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 - So a price per GB today is about the same as it was in 2010. 16 year regression, wow!by WithinReason
- I'm going to tell my kids about the terrible 20s where DRAM prices stayed flat (or increased!) throughout the decadeby casey2
- 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
- Nominal. The inflation-adjusted price today is 2/3 of what it was then.by pron
- 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.
by Aurornis - 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 fleebee
- 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.
by dominicrose - 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...
by jldugger - The dataset about memory prices now has a memory preservation problem. Very meta.by TimXare
- 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.
- > 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.
by fc417fc802 - 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.
by Retric - 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 mancerayder - 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.
by markus_zhang - 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.
by Aurornis - 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 - Back then was it 1000KB or 1024KB?by rootsudo