If you're in the market to buy you're gonna buy and it's going to be Intel. Why not try to get an RX 480 sale in there, too?
Most people don't know about or give two hoots about Zen. They just want to play some video games or get their kid a nice computer for the holidays.
But they should or should be trying to stall people at all costs and educating people about it so they do wait on it. If people are in the market for a CPU and they want to buy a PC and don't know about zen yet, this is a failing on AMD part, meaning they need to correct it. Meaning implementing marketing and promotions to get people to know about it.
If zen is available for a months times or atleast it's performance, people may wait. Better yet, since AMD is giving people a taste of the performance in a few days, if that performance is good, cobrand it with GPU making it a bundle by adding a rebate incentive or instant rebate so people will buy a zen system/motherboard/cpu in the future. Don't help sell an Intel CPU. Most people buying a rx480 have a system which can likely house a rx480 for the short term.
Helping selling a competitors CPU, when your chip is going to be available for sale in a month or so is baffling. Particularly the gravity of a zen sale vs a rx480 sale.
A rx480 sale is a spit in the wind compared to the potential profit of a CPU sale.
CPU's are just potentially so much more profitables than GPU's. Nvidia only matched intels margins with this founders editions crap and nearly 40% of their revenue coming from super margins data centers/pro market and super computers.
If zen is any good, a single zen sale is worth 3 or 4 rx 480 sales at the very least in term of profit. This is because a zen chip doesn't have the cost of the fullboard (pcb, power components, etc,) and board partner margin build into it. But if zen is any good and is around the same size, it will have the same selling price meaning AMD gets to absorb that as profit. Also, if zen is any good, this will be the 2nd or 3rd tier chip selling for around 200-240 dollars, meaning the cost to produce the chip is cheaper than a full rx480 chip. This translates from making 20-30 dollars on an rx480 to making 100-140 dollars on a zen CPU. And this is the lowest margin cut down zen CPU(of course assuming zen is good). Add on the profit on each MB chipset and it's insanely more profitable.
Just to illustrate it further
zen profit = MB chipset profit + 240 - (wafer cost, Packing cost(for chip and CPU), dealer markup, chip cost)
Rx480 profit = 240 - (wafer cost, board partner margin, board cost, packagining cost(chip and GPU), dealer marketup, game bundle cost)
I would estimate the board cost, board partner margin and game bundle to cost anywhere from 80-100 dollars.
And this is why AMD poured everything into it's CPU division and starved their GPU division. The CPU division can save AMD. Not their GPU division. AMD needs 300 million more sheer profit to simply properly fund their R and D for CPU's and GPU's. Perhaps even more, considering the increase in R and D cost with finfet and AMD still wants to turn a profit. Add in the volume with CPU's is higher and basically 5-10 digit gains in CPU marketshare translate into a billion or two in revenue and hundreds of millions in profit
quarterly. A far more likely scenario than trading spaces with Nvidia with marketshare and prices.
If AMD fans want to save AMD, they should be encouraging, hyping and doing everything in their power to get people to buy a zen CPU.