In the end price discovery is supply/demand, and it appears investment in DRAM manufacturing is focused on improving RAM performance, and just keeping up with demand, not outpacing it.
Since the barrier to entry is very high, there's not so much pressure to compete further on price.
While it's true that the market ultimately determines pricing, the fact that manufacturers can stuff larger amounts of RAM into the newer equivalent SKUs means the price per GB for fast memory would still be driven down. This is even possible if new unit prices are higher, i.e. if this year's "entry-level" SKU costs a little more than last year's but now has more capacity.
The thing that's gotten smaller is the minimum feature size on a silicon wafer. The same types of etching and doping processes can be used to create many integrated circuits.
DRAM chips are integrated circuts that consist of individual transistors and capacitors for each bit, plus the wiring and logic to read, refresh, and write to those bits. They're substantially transistors.
It's true that logic, power, analog, flash, DRAM, SRAM, and mixed signal ICs do have some significant differences, and some manufacturers optimize for a subset of those capabilities, but they're similar enough that if one industry advances leaps and bounds (like Flash storage and low-power processing have).
> The thing that's gotten smaller is the minimum feature size on a silicon wafer.
No, even minimum feature size is improving much slower than in the past. Fabs are focusing on specifics that are still giving gain: lower power transistors, SRAM. Really high performance transistors like for amps have not gotten much smaller, DRAM has not gotten much smaller, analog has not gotten much smaller.
The capacitors and sense amplifiers in DRAM have not gotten smaller nearly as fast as any of the other features.
> DRAM chips are integrated circuts that consist of individual transistors and capacitors for each bit, plus the wiring and logic to read, refresh, and write to those bits.
That’s a very satisfying answer. I’m aware that the processes for logic, flash, and DRAM have some significant differences but I don’t know much more than “differences exist” (e.g. and therefore you have a different die for CPU and flash).
My reasoning is, at best, “SSDs have gotten cheaper, SSDs are kind of like RAM, shouldn’t RAM get cheaper?” and I know that’s not exactly an expert opinion.
SSDs are non-volatile — they don’t need power and constant refreshing like DRAM does. So you can do different things based on a different heat and power budget, like going 3D and adding more layers that would kill regular ram or a cpu, etc.
