[quietbritishjim]

The author clearly wasn't implying that these were 1GB chips. They just wanted to show a graph scaled per unit of memory. It could just as well have been per byte, and the graph would've been identical but the values on the left would be changed by a factor of a billion.

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.)

[toast0]

> 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.

[ralferoo]

The problem with "price per typical-sized RAM chip as sold at the time" is not so much that it's subjective, but you'd get artificial spikes in the data.

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.

[account42]

IMO you'd really need to graph the price of how much RAM is needed to comfortably run contemporary OS + software combinations. That will get you an actual picture of the pain inflicted by the RAM prices.

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.