True, though at the end of the day the Fury X was a terrible product - too late, too slow, too power hungry, forced AIO cooler/radiator, loud/faulty pumps, no overclocking, to name a few.
I'm hoping Vega will be a much better product, if it's not then 1080TI here I come.
Largely agree, Fury X's direct competitor was the better buy, no question.
IMO, AMD found itself in a bit of a pickle with the part. It was designed as a balls-to-the-wall high end part -- no partially disabled die, HBM, premium card, etc. but when the Fury X's direct competitor dropped at $650, AMD might have found itself unable to price much lower due to the cost structure of the card, especially at the beginning of the cycle (brand new HBM, huge die on 28nm, etc.)
AMD seems to be making ~$299-$390 Fury X cards work now though. This can't be inventory draining because the card has been on the market for 1.5yrs...it doesn't take that long to clear inventory of a card that didn't really see much demand early on to begin with. So I suspect it is still being manufactured so that AMD has
some presence in the >$250 GPU market (even if it is, for all intents and purposes, a token presence). The fact that AMD
probably doesn't sell too many of these means that even if AMD's margins on them are very low, it doesn't dilute the company's overall margin results too much.
That's the curse of using bleeding edge technologies that have very little industry scale -- if they don't pan out and deliver the required results, you end up in a financial jam.
But I should caution, I don't think this is a case of AMD necessarily executing badly. AMD did a good job of getting a big die + HBM GPU out in the timeframe that it did, but it was simply outmaneuvered by a competitor.