Yes - with more and more users moving to laptops and wanting a longer battery life, raw peak performance hasn't moved much in a decade.
A decade ago, Steam's hardware survey said 8GB was the most popular amount of RAM [1] and today, the latest $1600 Macbook Pro comes with.... 8GB of RAM.
In some ways that's been a good thing - it used to be that software got more and more featureful/bloated and you needed a new computer every 3-5 years just to keep up.
> raw peak performance hasn't moved much in a decade.
In general, CPU clock speeds stagnated about 20 years ago because we hit a power wall.
In 1985, the state of the art was maybe 15-20MHz; in 1995, that was 300-500MHz; in 2005, we hit about 3GHz and we've made incremental progress from there.
It turns out that you can only switch voltages across transistors so many times a second before you melt down the physical chip; reducing voltage and current helps but at the expense of stability (quantum tunneling is only becoming a more significant source of leakage as we continue shrinking process sizes).
Most of the advancements over the past 20 years have come from pipelining, increased parallelism, and changes further up the memory hierarchy.
> today, the latest $1600 Macbook Pro comes with.... 8GB of RAM.
That's an unfair comparison. Apple has a history of shipping less RAM with its laptops than comparable PC builds (the Air shipped with 2GB in the early 2010s, eventually climbing up to 8GB by the time the M1 launched).
Further, the latest iteration of the Steam hardware survey shows that 80% of its userbase has at least 16GB of RAM, whereas in 2014 8GB was merely the plurality; not even 40% of users had >= 8GB. A closer comparison point would have been the 4GB mark, which 75% of users met or exceeded.
When I visit retailers' websites, the 8GB product category seems to be the one with the most products on offer. Dell, Asus, Acer, HP and Lenovo are also more than happy to sell you a laptop with 8GB of RAM, today. Although I would agree don't charge $1600 and call them "Pro"
So 8GB machines are still around, and not just in the throwaway $200 laptop segment.
I would agree with you that the 2024 Steam hardware survey shows a plurality of users with 16GB, whereas the 2014 survey said 8GB, so progress hasn't entirely stopped. But compared to the glory days of Moore's Law, a doubling over 10 years is not much.
> So 8GB machines are still around, and not just in the throwaway $200 laptop segment.
You're not wrong here! I entirely agree that 8GB laptops are still very much a thing, and RAM hasn't been growing at quite the same rate that it had been. But I'd bet most of those models with 8GB of RAM are much closer to the $800 range (if not more like $600).
I maintain that a closer statement is that typical RAM configurations increased by 4x over 10 years (aka doubling every 5 years). That is admittedly still a far cry from Moore's law doubling every 18 months.
And: the Steam hardware survey is obviously biased toward people who play video games on their computers, which in turn is biased toward people who like to play video games on higher-spec machines. Some of that takes the form of better graphics cards with more VRAM, but you certainly can find gaming laptops on the market with 64GB or even 128GB of RAM, whereas 10-15 years ago, that was the size of the SSD.
I remember in 2011 that 16GB was a lot of RAM even in a desktop (I purchased a kit of 4x4GB for about $100); these days, you can buy twice that amount in a single stick for cheaper. Manufacturers can put more RAM in machines if they want, but there isn't really enough demand to justify a different model with a corresponding increase in sticker price.
> it used to be that software got more and more featureful/bloated and you needed a new computer every 3-5 years just to keep up.
I'm sorry, "used to be" ? 90% of the last decade of hardware advancement was eaten up by shoddy bloated software, where we now have UI lag on the order of seconds, 8GB+ of memory used all the time by god knows what and a few browser tabs and 1 core always peaking in util (again, doing god knows what).
I don't dispute that software is currently bloated - I'm just saying the rate of increase of bloat is now much reduced.
Taking Steam's hardware survey as an example, from 2004 [1] to 2014 [2] RAM increased from 512 MB to 8 GB.
From 2014 to 2024 [3] RAM increased from 8 GB to 16 GB.
Software has bloated by 2x in a decade. But in the preceding decade, it bloated by 16x so keeping it down to a mere 2x is quite restrained in comparison.
To be fair, a decade ago gaming PCs came with 2GB to 4GB of vRAM. Today's gaming PCs come with 12GB to 20GB of vRAM. Most games don't demand a lot of system memory, so it makes sense that PC gamers would invest in other components.
You're also comparing Windows x86 gaming desktops from a decade ago with macOS AppleSilicon base-spec laptops today. Steam's recent hardware survey shows 16GB as the most popular amount of RAM [1]. Not the 5x increase we've seen in vRAM, but still substantial.
Tons of gamers are on 8gb because of mobile GPUs and becuase the only affordable 12gb GPU Nvidia has ever released is the 3060 which is a desktop GPU. I don’t honestly expect 12gb+ to become mainstream until 6000 series.
According to the Steam hardware survey, about 58% of the current-gen GPUs being used (NVIDIA 4000s and AMD 7000s) have 12GB+ of vRAM. I'd argue it's already mainstream - at least among "PC gamers". Obviously there is still plenty of old hardware out there, but I'm specifically focused on what people are buying new today because that's what OP was looking at.
I honestly think that given the demands of 4K video specifically using potentially a few gigs of memory just for decoding, 8gb made a world of sense, but little has come out since that really needs all that much memory for the average person.
When the industry moves to lpddr6/ddr6 I wouldn’t be shocked to see an increase to 6gb per module standard although maybe some binned 4gb modules will still be sold.
A decade ago, Steam's hardware survey said 8GB was the most popular amount of RAM [1] and today, the latest $1600 Macbook Pro comes with.... 8GB of RAM.
In some ways that's been a good thing - it used to be that software got more and more featureful/bloated and you needed a new computer every 3-5 years just to keep up.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140228170316/http://store.stea...