Well, the other angles were "what can we fit on a die?" and the relative speeds of single die CPUs and memory.
These have changed throughout history, e.g. when I was reading the Wikipedia CDC 6600 page, it pointed out magnetic core memory of the time could be much faster than germanium transistor CPUs (we're talking about the days when transistors had serial numbers!), and the silicon ones it were built with were fast enough that, with clever architecture (a 60 bit floating point multiply or divide still took many more cycles than a fast memory cycle) and compilers, a theoretical 3 MFLOPs resulted in an achievable 0.5 MFLOPS in FORTRAN. My first job in 1980 was supporting applied mathematicians who ran their FORTRAN on CDC and CRAY hardware at NCAR a couple of thousand miles away. One thing they were always concerned with was to write their array manipulations in a way that the compiler recognized to use the vector hardware.
Back then there was a huge premium on getting a serious CPU on a single die, and I think the speed mismatch with DRAM wasn't hardly as severe.
These have changed throughout history, e.g. when I was reading the Wikipedia CDC 6600 page, it pointed out magnetic core memory of the time could be much faster than germanium transistor CPUs (we're talking about the days when transistors had serial numbers!), and the silicon ones it were built with were fast enough that, with clever architecture (a 60 bit floating point multiply or divide still took many more cycles than a fast memory cycle) and compilers, a theoretical 3 MFLOPs resulted in an achievable 0.5 MFLOPS in FORTRAN. My first job in 1980 was supporting applied mathematicians who ran their FORTRAN on CDC and CRAY hardware at NCAR a couple of thousand miles away. One thing they were always concerned with was to write their array manipulations in a way that the compiler recognized to use the vector hardware.
Back then there was a huge premium on getting a serious CPU on a single die, and I think the speed mismatch with DRAM wasn't hardly as severe.