this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2026
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It hasn't felt t like there's been much significant performance increases or development in RAM in the last.. decade? Definitely not following moores law (if that even applies here). So if youve spent your time price fixing for the western market instead of developing technology to keep you ahead, then second rate competitors will eventually catch up and cut a huge portion of your market share, and enjoy those inflated prices instead of you. This of course is my very uninformed take, and probably completely inaccurate.
In memory? There's been a ton of improvement, even if most of the coolest stuff isn't making it into DIMMs that are installed in user laptops/desktops.
Advanced packaging technology has allowed chip manufacturers to put different silicon dies together with increasingly high performance (high bandwidth, low latency) connections in the same package, including with some three dimensional stacking. That way they can mix and match different silicon dies for greater cost effectiveness, yield, performance, etc.
This also means that in-package memory is now the standard in certain chips. Apple's M-series silicon has its memory packaged right into the CPU/GPU package, as a system-in-a-package, so that the connection between the logic and memory is comparatively much higher performance, several times higher bandwidth than desktops or laptops that don't follow that kind of architecture.
Similarly, in data centers, the AI boom has caused all the memory manufacturers to switch their production lines to high bandwidth memory, where they vertically stack a bunch of DRAM chips on each other, with ultra-fast, high bandwidth connections, so that they can shove terabytes of memory into these data center servers. These recent generations have been improving speed and bandwidth in ways that make consumer level DDR5 RAM look like child's play.
So they're improving things. Just not in ways that really show up in DIMM sticks.
Also DIMM sticks have gotten faster in the last decade.
Like, significantly faster than 2016 RAM.
To be honest DRAM was dirt cheap for quite a while and the profit margins of those companies were razor thin. Only recently they saw a surge in demand and they are exploiting it to enrich themselves but also increasing the manufacturing capacity is a lengthy and costly process which I presume some of those companies are actively trying to delay, in order to preserve their fat profit margins now.
Competition is good though and hopefully will lower the price overall faster.
Well, sort of, we're currently manufacturing high end ram by shooting gamma rays at an ultra smooth deflection mirror and moving the silicon back and forth on the other side, so we're hitting the physical constraints of our manufacturing capability.