[PurpleBuddha]

Maxwell House wrote:

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But does that speed increase include the bus, or just the memory's internal speed? Bus speeds have always been the bottleneck between CPU and RAM.

Plenty of advances have been made by Intel and AMD passing the front side bus right by:

Wiki

The front-side bus was criticized by AMD as being an old and slow technology that limits system performance.[8] More modern designs use point-to-point connections like AMD's HyperTransport and Intel's QuickPath Interconnect (QPI).[9] FSB's fastest transfer speed was 1.6 GT/s, which provided only 80% of the theoretical bandwidth of a 16-bit HyperTransport 3.0 link as implemented on AM3 Phenom II CPUs, only half of the bandwidth of a 6.4 GT/s QuickPath Interconnect link, and only 25% of the bandwidth of a 32-bit HyperTransport 3.1 link. In addition, in an FSB-based architecture, the memory must be accessed via the FSB. In HT- and QPI-based systems, the memory is accessed independently by means of a memory controller on the CPU itself, freeing bandwidth on the HyperTransport or QPI link for other uses.

This is always how things advance. typically one portion of computer system will advance forward causing other portions to bottle neck until they too advance. They drive each other forward.