reference wanted

[angledge]

Anyone got a good reference for increases in RAM over time? I'd love a handy little URL showing a chart of some sort ...

Comments

[fizrep.livejournal.com]

Increases in RAM? How so?

[angledge.livejournal.com]

RAM available on personal computers, & how that number has increased over time. I found a nifty chart for the equivalent in processing power (http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/mooreslaw.htm), but it would make my argument symmetrical to have charts for both.

[thereject.livejournal.com]

Random Access Memory has become increasingly powerful and plentiful in the past decade, but I don't know that such a chart exists.

[marasca.livejournal.com]

What the heck are you writing about? Is this related to your word request from yesterday?

[angledge.livejournal.com]

Yes, both requests were for the same essay. The question we're supposed to be answering is "Why hasn't spatio-temporality been implemented in commercial GIS?"

[krick.livejournal.com]

I think finding a chart of that type for RAM might be difficult.

The chart you have shows a graph of Intel processors displaying number of transistors over time.

The reason this chart is possible is because Intel is plotting a known value against time.

People can put (in theory) any amount of memory in a computer they want.

Some of the factors involved are...

1) what interface does the memory use and what type (and how many) physical connectors are on the motherboard

2) how much memory can the motherboard chipset address

3) how much memory can the CPU physically address... limited by word size and/or memory bus width

4) how much memory can the Operating System address

5) memory density

6) memory price

I'm not even taking the type and or brand of computer into account. Servers tend to have more memory than workstations which tend to have more memory than home computers.



Now with all that said, there are two routes you might want to examine that may get something you can use...

1) try to find statistical data from surveys taken by computer magazines like "PC Magazine" of how much memory their readers had in their computers each year.

2) try to find a graph from a memory manufacturer showing memory density. In many ways, the memory density graph will probably mirror the "moore's" law graph because the manufacturing processes are nearly identical.

3) you could just make your own graph. In your standard PC computer, this is roughly the amount of memory that a person would expect to have in a new high end PC for each year listed. Notice that the memory doubled roughly every 2 years until 2000 where it started doubling each year. Note: this data is off the top of my head based on my experiences growing up as a computer geek, I may be off a little here or there but since there is no "official" amount of ram in a computer, I'm sure this is pretty darn close.

1982 64K
1984 128
1986 256K
1988 512K
1990 1M
1992 4M
1994 8M
1996 16M
1998 32M
2000 64M
2001 128M
2002 256M
2003 512M
2004 1GB


...
Bill

[krick.livejournal.com]

I found some data on DRAM chip density. This might look good graphed...

http://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/elmat_en/kap_4/backbone/r4_4_1.html

There is a chart at the bottom of the page.

If you take the top row, and convert it all to the same units (probably megabytes is best) you can then graph it against the second row (the first year that density chip was produced).

[angledge.livejournal.com]

You rock. This is perfect.