The ASP has gone up because Nvidia has started selling mainstream GPUs for enthusiast prices, you know the thing that half this thread has been complaining about. And so what if they've taken away market share from AMD, doesn't change the fact that their strategy of increasing prices in a declining market has lead to record earnings.
Blame the buyers then, who buy these dGPU's on day one, when they're rewarding Nvidia for such tactics but I'm sure that won't happen. Free market, my choice & all that. The notebook market is also the reason why they get this premium because some buyers associate
high end plus notebooks with Nvidia, a lot of the times because of their mobile dGPU.
Point is that airfathaaaaa couldn't comprehend how a company could go for higher margin and low volume vs lower margin and high volume, and still remain profitable, even though there are tons of examples of companies doing so and being very successful (Nvidia themselves being one of them).
The point is, rationally speaking, in a market where all buyers are neutral, most of them will go for more value for their money whilst the rest would be inclined to get the GPU whose (certain) features, or performance level, they prefer like Physx & full Async compute et al. This is where you get an equilibrium with fairly competent solutions sharing the market fairly equally. The marketing, mindshare & brand loyalty disrupts all this. The perfect capitalist markets do not exist, they never did, & we only have ourselves to blame for it.
At the end of the day it's simply about finding the optimal inflection point between price and volume (volume being driven by demand at the given price), all companies try to do this and Nvidia's strategy of raising prices has clearly succeeded and lead to higher total profits.
Yes it has but again not just because they have better performance & higher efficiency, the impact of brand awareness & loyalty can never be understated & is, for me, one of the main reasons why Nvidia's marketshare took off on 28nm.
This upcoming 14nm could be different & we may see AMD getting back to their "Evergreen" days.