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 |
As a person who purchased all computer equipment for a 25 computer business for over three years, omgwtfbbq is right about this one.
Just because RAM size doubles every 24 months and prices remain the same doesn't mean that older RAM halves in price for the same equipment. While high-end RAM doubles in size and stays roughly the same price every two years or so, older equipment drops at a far slower pace. The same applies to HDDs, especially a 60GB drive that's already been in mainstream production for the past two years. It's already near its saturation point.
While Moore's law is definitely applicable to the CPU and GPU (though not quite as much because of RAM), it definitely does NOT apply to some of the peripheral components like RAM, HDD, power supplies, I/O, etc.
Another thing: Production costs are a slowing arc and the biggest gains are found in the first two years. After a time, the arc starts decreasing as raw material prices begin to eat into the R&D and tooling costs that originally took up so much of a product's cost. After a time, the arc stops completely and begins to actually increase again. This isn't a simple "cut in half every 24 months" formula we're looking at here.
As you might be able to tell, I spent several years doing PR and advertising for a manufacturing company. I learned a lot about pricing raw materials, sunk costs, tooling, scaling production, and cost effectiveness over time since I was in on many of the company meetings regarding sales promotions and advertising avenues. It's a complex business.
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