DRAM

The dataset is a revival: the long-defunct McCallum/jcmit price archive, pulled off the Internet Archive and extended past mid-2024 with Amazon pricing. Prices are nominal, not inflation-adjusted.

Commenters split on whether the chart even means anything: '$/GB is a totally useless unit' when 1960s machines shipped with kilobytes, says one. Another notes the log scale flatters the recent spike, and a third faults it for never marking the DRAM cartel years.

The agreements cover 40% of Micron's revenue and lock in margins “well above” any past peak, on the back of AI-driven memory scarcity. Q3 revenue hit $41.5 billion, up 346% year over year.

Skeptics in the thread call the contracts hedges, not handcuffs: no buyer keeps paying $1,000 for a part trading at $20, breakup fee or not. The counter-read is that this is just a market putting a floor under producers and a ceiling under buyers.

The recurring diagnosis: the bloat is architectural, not algorithmic. Bundling Chromium to ship a chat app is the problem, not your choice of data structure.

Where optimization will actually happen, per a big-tech engineer in the thread: server-side, where RAM is a line item, and mostly by 'stop doing stupid stuff', not fancy algorithms.