AI Summary
5 min readFor decades, the computer industry operated on a kind of promise: next year’s electronics would be faster, cheaper, and more powerful. That expectation, loosely known as Moore’s Law, was never a law of nature—it was a 1965 prediction by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip would double every year. For a long time, it held. But in the last year, something broke. The price of computer memory (RAM) has doubled or more, driven by an insatiable new customer: the AI industry. As a result, Nintendo raised the price of its Switch 2 by $50. Apple hiked prices on entry-level MacBooks and its cheapest iPad. The old rule that technology gets cheaper over time has suddenly, and perhaps permanently, stopped applying.
The Rise and Slow Death of Moore’s Law
Gordon Moore’s original insight was that semiconductors were special. Transistors—the microscopic on-off switches on computer chips—could be made smaller and smaller, allowing the industry to pack exponentially more of them onto a single chip. This meant that every year, you could buy something cheaper and more powerful. “Next year’s computers will be faster, cheaper,” Moore said in a 2006 interview. “Next year’s cameras will have more mega pixels, more memory, cheaper.”
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:22) **The Ram-pocalypse Begins** - Hosts Whelan Wong and Daren Woods introduce the episode's central problem: the AI industry's demand for memory has caused prices of RAM and other memory products to double or more in the last year.
- 2 (02:52) **What Moore's Law Promised** - A historical explanation of Gordon Moore's 1965 prediction that the number of transistors on a chip would double every year, making electronics faster, smaller, and cheaper.
- 3 (04:48) **Living the Law** - Iris Bahar describes her first job designing microprocessors at Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1980s, where she directly experienced the exponential gains Moore's Law promised.
- 4 (05:38) **The Death and Resurrection Cycle** - The industry has repeatedly declared Moore's Law dead, only to find a breakthrough that keeps it alive, a pattern Bahar describes as "it's dead, it's dead, it's coming... oh wait, no, we figured it out."
- 5 (06:25) **The New Reality: Creativity and Cost** - Bahar argues that achieving further advancements now requires more creativity and money, and the old assumption that improvements automatically lead to cheaper prices can no longer be taken for granted.
- 6 (06:40) **Memory's Fall and Rise** - The hosts recall how USB flash drives became so cheap they were given away as corporate swag, but now memory prices are skyrocketing due to AI data center buildouts.
- 7 (07:17) **The Milk Analogy** - Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus uses a grocery store analogy: if one person takes 40% of the milk, it creates a shock for everyone else, and that's what happened when AI companies began consuming massive amounts of memory supply.
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Show Notes
Fact checking by Sierra Juarez.
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