The problem for AMD is that the 4060 mobile is an absolute killer laptop card. AMD needs a low power consumption high power apu to compete.
Also soon the asahi graphics driver will run vulkan and fex has seen great improvements recently. It wouldn't surprise me you can get steamdeck levels of compatibility with games.
It did take from basically 2007 to 2011 to do the design and many dev runs through what is now Global Foundaries as the way GPUs are produced when manufactured into silicon by a foundry is fairly different than CPUs, so finding a working medium between those two processes took many failed attempts, pretty surprising they were able to do it in less than half a decade!
And both AMD and Intel lack much of any larger Professional Graphics Workstation Market presence and the Pro Markups to justify that kind of investment for giant monolithic GPU Die Tape-Outs for Pro Graphics Workstations!
Take Nvidia's GP102 tape-out from the past as an example and that Giant tape-out had more Quadro Branded SKUs and only one consumer branded binning, the GTX 1080Ti! And it's the same for Nvidia's later generations where that's for Quadro/A-series branded Pro Graphics workstation GPUs where Nvidia "__102" Tape-Outs are mostly Quadro/A series(The A series branding has supplanted Quadro branding for Nvidia Pro Graphics Workstation GPUs).
Example: https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/NVIDIA-Q...
And then Nvidia created Volta for the Data Center and AI as that had the first generation Tensor cores in a GPU.
TU102 was the same and for Quadro at the high end with some consumer binning as well and even the top end TU104 was initially reserved for Quadro until the Turing generation cards were getting ready to be replaced by the Ampere cards. And the Top end TU104 binning eventually was released for gaming usage(under the Super or Ti Branding).
Nvidia's Pro Graphics Workstation market domination has given Nvidia the funding to create those Giant Monolithic Tape-Outs and Billions for the mask-sets for that every generation. And maybe the gaming revenues were large relative to non gaming at one time but not any longer and most all of Nvidia's later acquisitions of other companies were for the Data Center Market and not consumer/gaming!
Gamers have some sort of collective Myopia with regards to Nvidia's focus on gaming only and gamers! And Nvidia's/Tech Press's marketing focus helped establish the appearance of Nvidia as a gaming only company. But look at Jensen's Keynotes over the last many years and even at consumer/gaming focused events and Jensen's Keynotes were/are mostly AI/Enterprise and cloud services focused, much to the chagrin of gamers!
I’m not a major gamer, so I don’t believe I have any myopia on this topic in that manner. As far as I can recall though, the GPUs with the heaviest overclocking capacity (including memory) were the flagship gaming GPUs and not the workstation Quadro based stuff. Volume was certainly in the gaming favor though and I don’t believe it to be even close. SKU count is more or less irrelevant.
My memory is certainly fallible and I was not as knee deep on the nvidia side during that era so I could very well be wrong. This goes against everything I remember from the firmware and overclocking side though. I don’t know why nvidia would have started locking down firmware so hard to keep the “pro” features locked into the workstation SKUs if it was an actual hardware binning situation vs. artificial crippling. This was right around the time that they started to really get into the datacenter space so it could be simple coincidence.
A lot of the people who are buying mid-range GPUs are asking their hardcore gamer friends with high-end GPUs for advice about what to buy.
If AMD isn’t competing at the high end, they are missing out on a very valuable funnel for mid-range GPUs
AMD has no 4090-killer, so their entire range is always seen as second-best, even for the customers who should be asking "what's the best choice AT MY SPECIFIC BUDGET".
I suspect that's half the reason Intel runs their top-spec SKUs at such absurd wattages-- they've got to own the top slot for the enthusiast-gamers, even if it's a tiny shard of the total market.
I'm sort of intrigued how this will work out for Intel's GPUs long-term. They have no claims of trying to chase the top market, and people were buying the A-series cards in significant part because they were what was available during Covid/Crypto GPU crushes.
