Does any of you remember if we ever had before a negative perf/$ in a new GPU release ??
Because according to NV slides, RTX2080 is 43% faster than GTX1080 but,
From Newegg prices the GTX 1080 start at $480 with cheapest RTX2080 at $749 or 56% more expensive.
The 7970 and 7870 definitely had a worse price to performance vs their outgoing last gen.
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7970/30.html
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7850_HD_7870/28.html
The 7870 was horrifically bad offender. AMD was charging $350 for a 213mm2 die on a cheap node(vs the 231mm2 Polaris which ranged from $200/240 on a much more expensive node).
Looking at the above chart, the 6870 had 67% better price to performance than the 7870. The 7970 was pretty bad as well having the same price to performance as the gtx 580 which was Nvidia's worst card as far as price to performance while having a 520mm2 die size.
The 7970 was 351mm2 die and AMD was charging $550s for it, vs the 6970's $369(389mm2) or the 5870 $399 price(331mm2). This comparison is actually favorable to AMD because this is using initial street pricing of those products. Not the EOL or clearance pricing.
AMD's initial pricing for the 7970/7870 was the trigger of the massive price inflation of smalls chips. AMD which is usually the value company which keeps pricing in check, decided to capitalize on a 3 month window before nvidia released their cards. AMD took the savings which comes from the shrinkage of dies with a new nodal process and put everything in their pocket and charged a big premium for their new products.
Nvidia followed suit after their chips beat AMDs, thus pricing their chips relatives to their competition and we have the story we have today.
Competition is important to have on both sides to keep pricing in check whether it is AMD or Nvidia. Nvidia needs competition to lower their pricing, however unlike AMD's initial 7970/7870 pricing, they won't get punished for pricing their cards high because AMD is likely to release anything in the consumer market until 2nd half 2019 which makes it the smarter strategic decision compared to the 7970/7870's initial pricing. What impacts this further is AMD used up much of their initial fanbases patients for their product with Vega. It has shaken consumer confidence in waiting for AMD. i.e a 30-40% performance jump from fury X to rx vega 64 after 26 months(16months after the competition) has shaken peoples faith for AMD producing a good GPU, particularly with RX Vega not doing much to the price to performance of cards because of high cost of production requiring limited rebates initially to be sold at 399 and 499 and their true pricing being 499/599 initially. Vega was a bad launch for AMD which has opened up an opportunity for Nvidia to be greedy.
Nvidia knows AMD doesn't have anything new for products for atleast 10months in the consumer space and they know AMD can't get into a price war because of high cost of production of Vega products. I.e dropping down to 399/299 for Rx Vega is not an option for AMD because of their high cost of production(dropping down to those prices would create a loss). Proof of this is the discontinuation of fury X in the consumer market. After the 1070/1080 launched, AMD quickly dropped the fury x and fury off the market rather then attempt to sell the Fury x at 399/299 because it was below floor pricing. This was very painful for AMD because Fury X was only on the market for 9 months which for a cash strapped company like AMD meant little chance to recover R and D.
Launching a Vega 20 is not much of an option either because as I have mentioned earlier supply and potential cannibalization of existing products.
In addition the performance given by AMD was 40% increase in performance or 50% reduction in power(not both as indicated by Wizard of techpowerup), given this is likely tflop performance and AMD is likely to reduce power consumption and reduce that number down to a 30% increase in performance/ 30 reduction in power, means this translates into 20-25% increase in actual gaming performance because of bottlenecks associated with the Vega architecture. This translates into maybe a $600 pricing point in today's markets once rtx is on the market. This is competitive towards Nvidia pricing but not so much to Vega pricing. This is because price to performance decreases as we go up the product stack. Add Vega 20's 16gb of HBM2 and your looking at rx vega 64 needing a pricing of 399 to be considering a serious option. At $499, the 25% performance advantage/double memory would make people lean towards the Vega 20 at $600.
Worse yet, Vega 20 might not make money at that price point. Another 2 stacks of HBM2 would probably cost another $100 given it is the most expensive memory at the moment and was 150 dollars in 2017 still for the 2 stacks on Vega 64. And then their is the wafer pricing.
http://caxapa.ru/thumbs/598000/WP_handel-jones.pdf
The $4800 figure being thrown around is the number for the raw cost for TSMC. The actual price for companies like Nvidia or AMD is near double this. These cost are less now because some time has passed but your still looking at 7k for a wafer. And here is the kicker,.
https://www.icknowledge.com/news/Technology and Cost Trends at Advanced Nodes - Revised.pdf
7nm wafers cost double what 14/16nm finfet wafers cost as seen in page 8. 7nm are at an ultra premium price at this points because of the maturity of the process meaning it would not surprise me to wafers at 16-20k a piece. What this means is AMD would not be making money at 600 and would have now performed a self inflicted wound on themselves because Rx Vega sales loss from a lower selling price, would mean AMD would be making less money with Vega 20 on the consumer market.
As a result, Vega 20 has been repeated stated to be reserved for the professional market where it can be sold for 3 to 5k. In the professional market, Vega's 20 competition(8k to 10k Quadros/Teslas) allows it to be priced high which allows it to be profitable even with the high cost of production. Taking a good Vega 20 die which can be sold for thousands and re-purposing it into a $600 rtx/gtx 1080 ti competition is simply not an intelligent business move which is why AMD is not doing it.