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Flops are cheap. Bandwidth is expensive. Latency is physics.

We aren't at full lightspeed latencies ram technologies, but we're closer than you may realize, and it's unlikely we can do substantially better any time soon without revolutionary advances.

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Curious. So you're suggesting that if we substituted SRAM for DRAM (assuming it was just as cheap and dense), that the absence of CAS latency, refresh, and capacitors wouldn't make much difference because offchip speed-of-light delays dominate?

[Edit] I realize it would always be slower than on-chip cache, but I thought it would still be at least an OOM faster then conventional DDRx DRAM.

Electricity moves around 2/3 of light speed.

More precisely the electromagnetic waves on the waveguides of the motherboard (bus) move around 2/3 as fast as electromagnetic waves in vacuum. Not as fundamentally separated as one would imagine.

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