| This problem has never existed with bigger DRAM cells. At some point in time, a few generations of DRAM ago, they have reduced the dimensions so much and without discovering adequate mitigations for the problems introduced by this, that the DRAM reliability has become inadequate. The reason why they did this was to reduce the fabrication costs. It is likely that the pressure to reduce the fabrication costs has been caused more by the desire to increase the profit margins than by the intention to enable any price reductions, because even before the recent price increases there have been around 15 years with only negligible reductions in memory prices. By increasing the fabrication costs, it would be easy to eliminate the RowHammer problem, while still having memory prices several times lower than the current prices. However, the vendors do not want this. They want to find some kind of mitigation that would not cause any measurable increase in the fabrication costs. Until now they have failed to do this, but it is not clear how hard they have tried. It is very likely that their failure to find anything that works has been caused in a good part by the secrecy that is typical for nowadays. In the earlier times of the semiconductor industry, every manufacturing problem was described in public research papers, with complete details, and usually the right solution was found by someone else and then it spread quickly in all the industry, with much less concerns about "IP" than today. Only this openness has allowed the creation of the successful semiconductor industry and of the "Silicon Valley". |
But current prices you mean during this huge spike? Sure, you could double fabrication costs while dropping prices a lot from today's state. But that's not impressive. That still costs more than I want.
If you could reduce the price significantly from when it was sitting at $2-3 a GB, I'd be interested, but I'd need a bunch of evidence.