Susuto

Disclaimer: I am a student in computer science and electrical engineering.

No. The CPU is about two orders of magnitude faster than RAM - you can execute a hundred instructions in the time it takes a memory fetch to occur. Take off one of those orders of magnitude like these people claim, and data-heavy programs will reach a limit of up to 10 times speed increase. The thing about hard drives is that they are anywhere from five to nine orders of magnitude slower than the CPU, making improvement in hard drives much more noticeable in the average case (such as using a RAM disk as you mentioned). Faster RAM would be an incredibly large win. It is by no means a dead research area, nor has it reached a point of diminishing returns. It’s merely exceedingly hard to achieve the said speedup using traditional methods.