Polaris didn't experience any clock uplift going to 14nm neither, Pascal did.
Like I said before AMD physical design team has a lot of work cut out for them. Over several generations of GCN the CU relatively remains the same so any changes to the design would yield an good result. You guys should really need to tamper expectation for RDNA 2, it could backfire. biggest Navi will be hot but it's not gonna be as hot as GA102 that's all I can say.
Polaris CUs have zero to do with not even with RDNA2 CUs but with RDNA1, even. RDNA1 already was better than than any previous physical design AMD brought in previous ... at least couple of years, and was way better architecture than GCN, at least for gaming. It was on par with Turing. So why would AMD not have a good ground to go further? Increase performance per flop, versus RDNA1, increase clocks, make it do more with each cycle, and make it do more cycles each second?
If we would judge the present by what was in the past, we would with confidence say, that AMD could've NEVER in history catch up to Intel, even Intel making mistake,after mistake, so they simply cannot do the same thing, when Nvidia makes mistake, right?
Nobody here has insane expectations, considering that we have seen the data from Power Tables. I don't know what fight you are fighting here, but its wrong, from the ground up.
RDNA2 is way more efficient than RDNA1, and from Ampere. Sure, AMD can clock it the hell out, put its balls to the wall, at 300W of power.
But it will result not in a tie with Nvidia, but with full blown straight up win, if - the specs we have seen in Power Tables are anything to go by.
And lastly. We have seen how efficient are consoles. Those consoles are using the same RDNA2 architecture, and sip power, compared to any previous generation of GPUs. Its because of that silicon design engineers that went to RTG after Zen 2, long after Raja left. And those people are responsible for this physical design, and those high clocks in relatively "humane" power envelopes.
Let me repeat.
Navi 21A - 2.2 GHz max boost clock at 238W per MacOS power tables.
Navi 21B - 2050 MHz at 200W of power.
Navi 22 - 2500 MHz at 170 of power.
Navi 23 - no specs visible, so far.
Xbox Series X 52 CU GPU with 1825 MHz core clock using the same amount of power as Xbox One/One S - 130-140W estimated.
I don't know what is to hamper here. We have all the data, and we can make pretty good guesses, about how powerful RDNA2 is.