| omgwtfbbq said: you are applying moores law to where it does not belong. It belongs in processors ONLY. Other things to not follow this trend. For instance, the price of RAM tends to fluctuate a lot, and drop slowly, to be replaced by larger RAM, it definitely does not halve every 24 months. RAM tends to get larger rather than cheaper.- Hard drves tend to bottom out at a certain price, for instance, you might drop $10 off the cost of a 60GB HDD tops. While in 2 years you miht find a 120GB HDD for the price of the 60B, the 60B won't be half the price it is now. In a couple of years, you miht find a 60GB HDD is MORE expensive than a larger one due to the numbers that are being produced. I really don't expect Sony to save much money on the hard drive or RAM. Optical media is an interesting one, it hits a point and drops extremely rapidly. If sony only saves half the money on blu-ray in 2 years I will be incredbly shocked (unless the format flops). Power supplies, on the other hand, don't get any cheaper. Don't expect much of a saving there. You can't apply moores law to anything other than transistors, different components price reduce differently (if at all)
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Yes, you can apply Moore's Law to other hardware, because nearly all PC-based hardware has followed Moore's law, regardless of whether its an "according to Hoyle" transistor. Processors, motherboards, RAM, hard drives, flat panel monitors, even things as mundane as the keyboard + mouse have seen price reductions on a scale fitting to Moore's Law, regardless or their composition or whether they fit the classical definition dating back to the 60s.
I stated such in the very first paragraph of that post. The inverse of a doubling of capacity is that the depreciation cost at the same speed is half. Overall prices across the industry fall in relation to an increase in consumer base, which is not calculated by Moore's Law. Simply put: volume price reduction.
RAM prices do not drop slowly only to be replaced by bigger RAM. You're grossly oversimplifying the reality of RAM development. RAM speeds increase many orders of magnitude as RAM density increases, while the top-end inflation-adjusted price usually remains a constant. e.g. the inverse is that existing RAM price has been halved. If you want to dispute this, I've got two 8Mb sticks of top-of-the-line EDO DRAM I'll sell you at a 1995 price of ~$199.
This is how much RAM ~$200 would buy, give or take:
1993: 8Mb
1995: 16Mb
1997: 32Mb
1999: 64Mb
2001: 128Mb
2003: 256Mb
2005: 512Mb
2007: 1Gb
