We supposedly live in a world where electronics get cheaper even if everything else is subject to rampant inflation. Here’s an example from PC Part Picker’s memory price trend for 18 months:
Most of the other graphs are flat as well. If you adjusted these for official CPI there would perhaps be a slight downward trend in real dollars.
Why are memory prices more or less stuck at 2023 levels? Is it that fewer companies are making RAM? That the AI Boom (TM) has increased demand? (economics proves that immigrants don’t drive up prices for housing, but Econ 101 says that demand for memory drives up prices for memory)
Related:
- Where are the 16 TB M.2 SSDs? (from July and there still aren’t any for sale)
DDR4 has been going up. It’s now a 25 year old technology with minor improvements. It’s like using a computer from 1955 in 1980. Normally, falling technology prices push up everything else from monetary policy. Rising or flat technology prices cause the fed to push down everything else.
If all other prices are going up, the relative price of memory is going down even as the absolute price remains steady. Have not considered foreign currency affect.
Chipmakers spend a lot of money making CPUs faster by means of being more complicated internally, including caches, and not enough R&D into making main RAM faster. Like lion said, that has made memory kind of stagnant technology and not follow Moore’s law. A.I. probably is a factor, and even bitcoin–which made high end graphics cards go up.
The latest laptop I bought, a Lenovo, has 8GB of memory soldered to the MB, so the price won’t matter to me anyway.
All of which is probably a bunch of crap, that was just off the top of my head. Who knows, it might as complicated as controlling ^H^H^H^H^H^H predicting the weather. Covid was was very disruptive to the chip supply chain in general, and there is a DDR6 coming up or already here. Is RAM a market traded commodity, what is the elasticity…?
A bit off topic, there is an interesting OCW lecture series on performance engineering of S/W, which discusses the organization of the CPU and memory in relation to writing performance-oriented software:
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-172-performance-engineering-of-software-systems-fall-2018/
It talks about the complexity of the CPU model which is presented to software, like memory barriers, cache lines, … Dr. Leiserson (of algorithm book fame) talks a little about how SGI had better multiprocessor designs than the ones common today, and why we don’t have them now.
It really seems like having faster RAM closer to the CPU would be beneficial, and worth investing a lot of R+D in, to reduce the large complexity of caching circuitry. [I started watching OCW lectures shortly after watching the video lectures of ADUni, which is where I learned about Phil, and Scheme, who I am very grateful for his (really quite pioneering) contribution to free/online education.]
I couldn’t believe how much the PCIe M.2 SSD sped my machine up.
I guess my follow-up question is “Why do you want to know the price of tea in China, Phil?”, as we used to say before Covid.
> We supposedly live in a world where electronics get cheaper even if everything else is subject to rampant inflation
I live in my own little world where there are spherical cows (makes it harder for the Mennonites to tip them over) and no market manipulation–no one has ever dumped memory chips or timed stock trades. Who the hell knows what the Wizard of Oz is doing behind the curtain, pay no attention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_dumping
(someone needs to add a entry for my spherical cows to this page. My uncle in SF used to have a cow chip encased in acrylic in his study with a little placque that said “The buck stops with Truman, here is where the B.S. ends up.”)
Sorry I keep violating the “no cuteness” rule, I do like to think of myself as an avant-garde, post rational, satirist, but whatever. I’m here mostly to divert myself my PTSD flashbacks of Becky from 8th grade sticking her tongue out and passing me a note that says, “13RI:SKNEATA–No I won’t sail with you on your uncle’s yacht in the SF bay on your family trip.” Wait, I don’t remember even asking her, that was the other Becky. “S.M+T.D. Forever.”