Chart Explorer
Switch metric and price band. Hover for source rows; click a point to open its item page when the point comes from a specific device.
What This Tracks
The data tracks accelerator-accessible memory in one physical machine, grouped by complete-machine price band. It covers Apple, NVIDIA, and AMD from 2020 through 2026.
The core question is practical: what can someone buy or configure locally, and how do affordability, capacity, bandwidth, and vendor tradeoffs move over time?
How To Read The Symbols
- U
- Unified or coherent memory available to the accelerator.
- V
- VRAM on one discrete GPU.
- Σ
- Aggregate installed VRAM across multiple GPUs in one chassis.
- *
- Price band inferred from a documented component bill of materials.
- ≈
- Estimated, reconstructed, or bill-of-materials inferred price.
Aggregate VRAM is useful, but it is not the same thing as one unified memory pool. Treat aggregate points as chassis capacity, not a guarantee that one process can use it as one contiguous model memory space.
Main Read
Under $3,000, AMD changes the shape of the local market in 2025 and 2026 with 128GB unified memory through Framework Desktop-class hardware. Apple is strong on usable unified memory, but the current sub-$3,000 Apple ceiling in this dataset is 64GB. NVIDIA stays at 24GB in this band because the data tracks complete machines, not used cards or component-only builds.
In the $3,000-$5,000 band, both AMD and NVIDIA reach 128GB unified or coherent memory by 2025-2026. This is the band that matters most for consumer and prosumer local model work because it is expensive but still within a serious personal hardware budget.
In the $5,000-$10,000 band, Apple has the most dramatic historical point: the 512GB M3 Ultra Mac Studio launch configuration in 2025. The best-so-far memory charts keep that 512GB point through 2026 because the historical record should not go down just because the current Apple configuration changed.
Above $75,000, NVIDIA dominates the memory and bandwidth records. DGX Station-class systems are local in the physical sense, but not local in the affordability sense.
Local Hardware Database
A TechPowerUp-style catalog for complete local systems and accelerator configurations, including Apple unified-memory machines.
Method
The editable source of truth is data/items/*.json.
The generator expands each item price history into CSVs, derives
annual and best-so-far records, and renders the Space from those
generated artifacts.
The complete-system price-per-memory metric is total configured machine price divided by accelerator-accessible memory. The extracted component memory-price file is separate and should not be confused with complete-machine affordability.
The projection view fits simple least-squares linear trends to 2020-2026 best-so-far memory series. It is a scenario view, not verified future product data.