

Historical Chip Pricing now on Octopart - cornmander
http://octopart.com/blog/archives/2012/7/historical-pricing

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aswanson
I love these cats. Price transparency and efficiency in this market is waaay
overdue. I would have never have guessed that chip prices _rise_ over time.
Seems like on the very lowest level of chip complexity, Moore's law doesnt
apply.

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greenyoda
Think supply and demand rather than Moore's Law. If the supply of a chip goes
down (e.g., a manufacturing plant gets hit by an earthquake) or demand goes up
(Apple designs the chip into the next version of the iPhone), then its price
could definitely go up.

I'd guess that the markets for chips would be driven by similar dynamics as
other commodities, such as oil.

Maybe the next step will be real-time feeds for chip prices, and after that
people will start trading chip futures on Wall Street?

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georgemcbay
Economies of scale also play into this pricing. You can have chips whose
demand is actually quite low but enough for there to be some market and they
could increase in value relative to parts being used in the newest iPhone
(even though the iPhone clearly has much greater "demand").

Apple gets really good prices on their components even though they generate
huge demand because the parts manufacturers know they'll be able to sell
millions of whatever the part is, so they can afford to sell it with less
margin for themselves per unit. This isn't true of smaller volume chips where
the manufacturer has to price some amount of lost opportunity cost into a
relatively small market item.

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drcube
I really like Octopart and this feature is great. But was I the only one
expecting to find out how much a 6502 cost in 1975? Or how much the original
x86 chips cost on launch? Was the 80386 cheaper than the 8086 when they were
introduced?

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ck2
Where on earth would they get such data going that far back?

This is more like CamelCamelCamel for amazon, very helpful to find out if the
current price is reasonable or what better low to expect.

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shalmanese
Seems like average price is the wrong metric. You're vulnerable to errors in
your database like vendors setting the price to $999 to indicate that it's out
of stock or vendors never updating the price of products that don't move.

Lowest price from a place that lists it as in stock seems like a far better
metric. Or even something like 25th percentile price.

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cornmander
We've actually tried a bunch of different algorithms for pricing and we're
still figuring out the best formula.

It's very atypical for a vendor to set the price to $999 to indicate OoS,
since they do provide us with quantity information and can also choose to
delist parts from their data feed. We generally get pretty good data from
vendors and we have internal consistency checks to filter out the few odd
cases where something doesn't line up.

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eru
You might want to look into the area of robust statistics (e.g.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robust_statistics>), if you haven't done that,
yet.

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Cogito
The graphs you are using here look very similar to Google's stock price
history charts[1]. Are you using a shared library, or similar?

[1] for example:
[https://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:FB](https://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:FB)

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angelshead
This is very cool. I wish other things had historical pricing info.

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cookingrobot
[self promotion] You could try www.shopobot.com.

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drewp
Nice- I wish you had frys.com products. HD-4110 camera recently bounced
between $29 and $89

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egowaffle25
Any plans on opening up the data through an API or possibly for download as a
CSV? I'd be interested in running some analysis on it.

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icefox
Finally some data on LCD pricing and how fast it is dropping

