With the way wafer costs keep increasing, physically smaller dies are inevitable. 50% higher density at 30% higher cost or whatever implies that if you keep the same die size, then cost goes up 30%, and in market terms that die has moved up a product tier. That number I was referring to is total transistor count and transistors-per-$ not die area, the cost of producing the same sized (eg 200mm2) die across nodes has skyrocketed, a 4060 Ti is far far more expensive than a 1060 to produce.

Clamshell also adds PCB/assembly cost which people never account for. And all of this has to have partner margins rolled into it too etc. Eg at one point it was like $3.50 per 8gbit module, assuming 16gbit modules are comparable then 8GB x $4 = $32 of memory, but probably there's another $10-15 in the PCB and assembly, plus partner margin, etc. $50 would be partners losing margin, $75 probably they break even, $100 definitely is pushing up margin a bit, but that's also what people wanted, if you remember back to the bandwagon around EVGA. I think in the rush to bandwagon everyone just forgot who ultimately pays that margin ;)

(and of course in launch terms, once cards are manufactured it's painful to open them up and remanufacture them all, are you going to desolder the BGA to put it on a new PCB, one by one?)

I've commented the same thing before, that 3060 Ti 32GB would also be a very appealing product at the moment. I guess they have their reasons but it seems like a slam-dunk cashgrab at this moment of AI mania?

RDNA3 does have WMMA which should at least get the foot in the door for things like AI/ML(-weighted TAAU) upscaling. I expect them to take a crack at that with FSR4, I strongly discount rumors that they're not working on that, especially with the console refresh (PS5 Pro at least) having RDNA3 and some kind of AI core. Even if sony builds one in-house, AMD totally have to be working on one internally too, just there's various reasons not to talk about it externally etc (people wanted them to not announce overly early etc, this is what that looks like). They'd want something for devs who want to validate once across multiple platforms anyway, they definitely will launch something within a year if not alongside the PS5P itself. WMMA may not be the answer for pure training horsepower though, NVIDIA having full-fat tensor units (like CDNA's) in their gaming GPUs was a good move (I won't even say "lucky", they've worked for it). But RDNA3 WMMA is better than nothing.

I really think Intel's architecture is aimed at a future-node (plus an attempt to get the foot in the door on game/driver support). wave-8 is indeed way too finely grained for most workloads right now, but the pendulum is swinging back from cache to logic, and that means you have more transistors to spend on such frivolities. Growing the EUs definitely makes sense to me, like they were proofing the control/scheduling side at a small scale first, now they build the rest of it, etc. It just feels obviously wrong to do wave-8 right of the gate, on a 3060/3070 tier product at best, so what was the real goal? Some kind of incremental/iterative development, presumably.

But yeah intel is a can of worms. The last time I checked (probably 6mo ago) they were operating the graphics division at -200% margin, which is needless to say stunning. I just also think they really have no choice, the writing is on the wall with NVIDIA Grace and MI300X and Apple Silicon Max/Ultra that big APUs are the future, both for a number of consumer segments but especially for a lot of HPC and even enterprise segments. Can't be competitive in HPC or enterprise if you don't have it, and even for laptops, you can't not have an iGPU. So if you cancel it do you go to Imagination or someone and license PowerVR like the bad old days of Atom? That's not a compelling product when AMD is turning out chips like 7840HS and soon the Strix Point/Strix Halo line.

Other people tend to read that as "-200% margin, they'll cancel it any day now" but I actually read it as the opposite, it's "-200% margin and it's so important they are barreling through anyway". They are canceling stuff left and right but they don't have a choice on Xe/Arc regardless of the cost. And specific dies being canceled based on the current stuff doesn't mean anything in that context - that's just staying agile rather than over-committing to a schedule before you know what product you're going to build.

But in general Intel can't seem to execute much of anything very well these days. Every good release feels like a fluke and they're back to the woodshed in no time. Alder Lake came with the loss of AVX-512, the 2.5gbe NICs are stuck in a state of permanent re-spins and steppings, Sapphire Rapids has some fatal power flaw that needs a 1200W psu (and they're not kidding) due to silly 700W+ transients and is getting a respin just in time for emerald rapids, meteor lake was basically 6mo late and still had a messed-up BIOS and still undershot performance targets, on and on, and they're cutting pay and firing staff. Death-spiral territory right there.