Every physical design stands on three pillars. Power/Performance/die area.
You can sacrifice one of them, for the other two. With Turing, and previously with Volta, Nvidia sacrificed die area.
AMD did not. One of the reasons why is that the 7 nm did not turned up as good as everyone thought and hoped. Navi is relatively small GPU. In order to increase clocks, and pack as much architectural changes AMD burned a lot of X-tors. AGAIN. But that would require redesign, and would result in much higher manufacturing costs for Navi. Which is not good idea, because of what I wrote in one of previous posts: There is no growth in client GPUs. Client GPUs are doomed, and you better get used to this. Go back to the posts in which I talked about the reality of process nodes(high design costs, no growth, etc). It directly relates to this.
I agree with you that Client GPUs and node jumps in general are experiencing stagnation; however, am quite positive about AMD having a better handle on how Navi should turn out as they had another (bigger) 7nm part in production for atleast 6+ months. Maybe TSMC let them down and they were unable to meet performance targets with this particular variation of Navi (which now appears happened as they've made significant changes to chip design/ different uArc)
However, the X-factor for AMD is consoles. Sony bore the brunt of Navi development cost and having both console manufactures in the bag, in addition to what appears to be the cloudfront as well (MS Azure & Stadia) most of their RnD for chip design is already done. All they could do is port the base design onto consumer parts. Since both Sony and MS, in order to leg up on the other, opt for chips in different performance tiers; AMD gets free RnD for their PC parts. Last couple of chips from Sony have been near replicas of their PC parts.
If AMD was able to release consumer chips back when they were cash strapped and layoffs we happening left and right, they are certainly in a better position to do so now. Nvidia won't ever stop producing desktop chips as long as there are consoles (& they're not powering them).
When the dies came out of bakery and AMD find out that 7 nm process was not as good as everyone hoped for, they went back and sacrificed power for performance, and high margins on GPUs. This is reality that we will face in future.
I exclude even the ridiculous expectation people have had(150W, RTX 2070 competitor for 250$, otherwise its a fail!!!11oneonetwo!), which actually show what brand prerception AMD has, and what brand perception Nvidia has(one of you here posted that RTX 2070 is 180W GPU. Apart from it is 215W GPU, actually, so thats that).
AMD need to prove themselves, again, on the GPU front; as they've done with the CPUs. I remember how let down people were to find out that multi core, super high Ghz bulldozer was actually slow compared to intel's with half the cores/lower clocks. As a result, even now, when a relatively uninformed buyer goes in the market and someone suggests that the AMD part has more cores and speed and actually perform better, people still buy intel.
It's a similar ditch they've dug up for GPUs by overvolting & giving us 250/300 Watt GPUs for last couple of generations (that don't beat their counterparts).
If what you say about process nodes would be true, why Intel haven't solved their 10 nm Issues? Why we will have Ice Lake only on nieche products, and no real volume parts? Why Nvidia haven't used 7 nm process for Turing? The paint is on the wall, already, guys.
I used to follow the whole 10mn debacle up until a few years back (with some semi accurate information that turned out to be true). However, the moment I saw Ryzen benchmarks and understood their future strategy, intel became irrelevant, fast.
Also, these are business decisions. How they turn out depends on respective companies and their strategy, which isn't always correct.. As we've seen with AMD's powerhogs, intel's eternal pursuit of 10nm & Nvidia's attempt to revolutionize the market with RT goodness.
However, we will have ultra powerful consoles pretty soon which would necessitate faster desktop hardware and I'm pretty sure there will be capable products we can purchase from either camp. Now, if we need to tune them ourselves for lower power consumption, that remains to be seen. Masses vote with their wallets, & when they don't pay, companies change strategies.. or ownership..
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