If true, it sounds like they were rushing things a bit (seems to be a theme with the FinFET transition on both sides...)
It's funny you should mention rushing things, because I was looking back over some old Polaris threads and came across
this one from just over a month ago. To cut to the chase we had a 'source' saying the following:
What HardOCP knows from sources inside and outside the company, AMD has a problem on its hands, as both these products have come up significantly short of where these were supposed to land. But that is OK for AMD, it will simply send Chris Hook out to fall on the sword and tell a story of that was the plan all along....to produce brand new parts much slower than its last high end GPUs. In the simplest terms AMD has created a product that runs hotter and slower than its competition's new architecture by a potentially significant margin. Let the internal finger-pointing begin! The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 launch was a surprise to AMD and it simply does not have a harpoon for Moby Dick this time...again. One could go as far as saying that the potential exists for another R600 moment. Now, I am sure AMD will take every step possible to mitigate this gap but the simple reality of the situation as it stands today is that AMD has a loser on its hands and are going to have to pull every trick in the book to spit-shine the turds, and the fact of the matter is pricing is how you do that. All is definitely not fine in Radeon-land these days.
Now there was a lot to criticise about this, mostly the usual chronic misunderstanding about how Polaris is a mainstream part not meant to be going up against the 1070 etc. And this was roundly dismissed as scaremongering based on FUD anyway. Yet, I now wonder if there was maybe more than just a grain of truth somewhere in there. In particular the high power consumption of the 480 makes me wonder if the 14nm process did fall short of expectations and this was only discovered fairly late on. There also seems to have been a wider than normal silicon lottery at work with the review samples seeing the disparity in power consumption and overclockability etc. I've gotten the sense that
something has not gone right or smoothly with 14nm beyond what AMD could anticipate and there's been some last minute tweaking and course corrections for Polaris.
IIRC Polaris was demoed with working silicon at the very start of this year and there were suggestions they could launch it before NV. We know how those predictions turned out, then again in fairness the 480 at least had decent availability at launch compared to the 1080/70 and the founders edition thing. Frankly the prices and availability on Pascal here means it may well have not launched at all for all the hope of getting my hands on one at a decent price. I'm speculating here but I think both AMD and NV have faced similar problems with their respective processes and NV have chosen to launch early for better or worse, while I reckon AMD could have launched sooner than they did but delayed for a while to build up plenty of stock.
This is not even getting into the supply of Polaris chips to Sony for the PS4 and to Apple. There must have been some wild things going on behind closed doors for those deals and we as GPU enthusiasts are only seeing the tiniest bit of it.