@YouTheNoob Ram is in fact the limiting factor in any program that aims to be efficient. See also:

Which is a course about program optimization. There are two whole lectures dedicated to how RAM (and the CPU cache) works and how you can 'feed the beast' the most efficiently.

And about your suggestion on the thread count / processor usage: The game is threaded (render thread, sim thread, audio thread, etc) - but the sim thread (the limiting factor) is not subdivided into various threads. And that is why we have sim drops while 'leaving' all that computing power unused.

And to remain on-topic: a CPU with a large cache that can work with fast memory is beneficial - more beneficial than having a 5ghz CPU.