Last year when I was looking to build a new computer RAM was cheap as hell, and now it's almost twice as much as I remember it being. What caused the price hike?

Also, are motherboards cheaper than they were last year or is it just me?

I bought RAM about a month ago and thought the same thing.

Perhaps it is related to either the supply of todays RAM being less than that of yesteryear's RAM, the demand of todays RAM is greater than that of yesteryear's RAM, or some combination of both.

...or it could just be old-fashioned greed. Either way, it sucks because I was getting ready to upgrade my PC.

Problems with Manufacturing, and large amounts going into computer, also the price of flash memory is affecting it, with people like Apple buying large quantaties for new iPhone/iPod Touch's and more than likely SSD Macbooks and the new tablet. The average at the moment is 4Gb, and im some cases 8Gb, this is causing constraints, I have seen that our prices have dropped a lot, 2x4Gb of mem for macbooks pro at my costs is now about £230 were it was about £600-700 about 6 months ago, the older the memory the more expensive it gets, all 800Mhz is sooooo expensive as it had such a short life span compared 667Mhz and 1066Mhz.

RAM price increase (in DRAM bits/$) follows an exponential trend, like Moore's Law for integrated circuits, and has been fairly stable the last decade.

source

There's an interesting relationship with feature size

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I don't know much about RAM works, but I know a fair bit about semiconductors. Current MOSFET technology involves a source, a gate and a drain and current gate lengths (about 29 nm) are getting very close to a fundamental limit where quantum tunnelling will overtake the effects of thermal fluctuation and signal-to-noise ratio will increase as feature size is decreased (this limit is at about 22nm, according to my calculations. I can post this work if anyone is interested, it didn't make the final edit of my report). Eventually, the noise from quantum tunnelling will be equal to the actual signal of the electrons travelling from the source to the drain (a signal-to-noise ratio of 0.5) and this CMOS device will be rendered utterly useless.

This limit will be reached very soon (possibly by 2020), and is inevitable for silicon-based semiconductor technology and will certainly affect the improvement of RAM. As a result, RAM will continue to get more expensive but will not increase in speed or information density at the same exponential rate - until a new paradigm is reached. Fortunately, there are a variety of spintronic technologies that may end up saving the day.