Maybe you’re right, but I’m not sure the timelines agree with this. While people were trying to figure out whether or not the Navi 21 was going to be competitive, Ampere was already a known quantity regardless of shader count. The cards released a couple of weeks before rdna2 specs were announced.

I doubt this. They just might drop TSMC for them and go with Samsung. TSMC is way too expensive for big dies given the reluctance people have to pay similar prices to Nvidia for similar performance from AMD. At the end of the day, AMD doesn’t have a significant edge from a cost perspective. Chiplet benefits are cool, but AMD needs an interposer so the cost advantage might not be as impressive and the 6nm dies might not be as cheap given that they’re still manufactured on TSMC.

So TLDR: I think they might shift their focused for the higher end market, but I doubt they will entirely abandon it. They might just take a break from it.

The only hint people had for that was the bus width, which was indeed 256-bit. It’s just that people couldn’t fathom that AMD had a fast GPU with so little memory bandwidth.

I’m not sure this leak shares anything that would tell us what performance target this GPU could belong to.

Why?