With a smaller die, too. And at equal performance, Nvidia will set the MSRP at $250-260 as well, meaning they are making noticeably more money per chip/card sold with higher prices and lower costs. AMD's margins continue to get squeezed and R&D continues to suffer as a result.
It's too late to say woulda coulda shoulda but AMD needs to back off the high end again and bring out a technologically competitive mid-range die that can scale well as an x2 card to compete with Nvidia's high end. Had P10 been within 20% of GP104's efficiency, an RX 480 would be only 20% slower than GTX 1070, could have been priced at $250, and would easily defeat GTX 1080 as a $500 x2 card.
AMD's continued console-update wins will help alleviate the technical hurdles vs. Pascal somewhat, but I don't think Pascal is going to lose ground as much as Maxwell did (and certainly not as much as Kepler). If Pascal holds up well and Nvidia's technical advantages keeps them steam rolling the market, we could be looking at AMD's last node it manufactures discrete GPU's on.
2x strategy is bad because of the aversion to multi-GPU setup. Gamers just don't like it, SLI/CF are niche. **
Until Navi, on the same interposer, presenting as a single big GPU to APIs, it's not a viable strategy.
They just needed GloFo to perform better. If Vega is on GloFo, it's not going to look good at the high end against GP102 either. Damn shame really.
As for how GPUs age..
Do you remember when Fury X was released, it was 10% behind 980ti at 1440p? I said give it 6 months and it will match it. It did. GCN just keeps getting better with time due to the console effect & AMD's driver optimizations.
Pascal will no doubt fade once Volta is here. Remember they have to put back a hardware scheduler if they want to excel in DX12 and it's multi-queue parallel nature. By that time frame, DX12 would certainly have matured.
How the high-end play out will depend on whether GloFo get their act together for 14nm or even if Vega is on 14nm, could be 16nm FF. We don't know. But how the mainstream play out, I'm pretty sure GP106 is going to wreck Polaris 10 in sales due to the perf/w advantage.
** I find it hard to justify for my own purchase of RX 480s. But because I only play a handful of AAA per year, as long as those titles have CF support, it's good. I don't care about most other games. To me, BF1 needs excellent CF scaling, so does Deus Ex. Still waiting for this TW Warhammer DX12 patch, I've already got 200 hours into it and more, mods are great.