The bad part is everyone wants to be on the AI money circle line train (see the various money flow images available) and thus everything caters for that. At this point i'd rather have nvidia and amd quit the gpu business and focus on "ai" only, that way a new competitor can enter the business and cater the the niche applications like consumer gpus.

Nvidia is expected to sell GPU intellectual property at a bargain to the entry-level segment, making it unprofitable for Intel to develop a competitive product range. This way, Intel would lack both the competence and the infrastructure internally to eventually break Nvidia’s market share in the higher segments.

The Intel Arc B60 probably would have made a splash if they had actually produced any of the damn things. 24GB vram for low prices would have been huge for the AI crowd, and there was a lot of excitement and then Intel just didn't offer them for sale.

The company is too screwed up to take advantage of any opportunities.

Yeah, maybe in a decade. And the "benefits" will be a metric shit ton of job losses plus a crash that will make 2000's dotcom plus 2007ff real estate/euro combined look harmless...

But to answer - memory is progressing very slowly. DDR4 to DDR5 was not even a meaningful jump. Even PCIe SSDs are slowly catching up to it which is both funny and sad.

As for the usecase - I use my memory as a cache for everything. Every system in the last 15-20 years I used I maxed out memory on, I never cared much about speed of my storage, because after loading everything into RAM, the system and apps feel a lot more responsive. The difference on older systems with HDDs were especially noticeable, but even on an SSDs, things have not improved much due to latencies. Of course using any webapp connecting to the network will negate any benefits of this, but it makes a difference with desktop apps. These days I even have enough memory to be able to run local test VMs so I don't need to use server resources.