We've moved on from one form of stupidity, to a conversation I think is worth having.
May I pose the question as such. Is AMD trying to market their brand in an entirely new way, or better yet are they competently marketing the brand?
I'd like to offer the following. I occasionally (upon release of new product lines) get e-mails from Nvidia about their latest and greatest cards. I never seemed to get those e-mails from AMD, until the 3xx series cards had a date. In the last three months I've been inundated with requests to follow AMD on Twitch, where they'd be giving away a brand new card after you were forced to watch somebody stream with it.
AMD has limited the amount of people who were offered Fury and Nano samples. You can argue this as AMD being paranoid, but it seems to be a stupid point. Nvidia have said that they won't release an HBM1 powered card, because of a severe limitation on the available stock and the memory limits. This is the company that proudly released a nearly 1600 USD card, that could be outperformed by an SLI setup with cards that were 1/2 the price and less. If you're willing to place that kind of albatross around your neck, yet still pass on HBM1, what does that say about the maturity and availability of HBM1?
Is AMD pricing themselves out of the game? It seems that way, but only because of incompetence of message. Nvidia can put the 970 (340ish USD), 980 (520ish USD), and Titan Z (1600ish USD) into a generation and "win." AMD on the other hand offers the 380 (200ish USD), 390 (320ish USD), and the Fury (650ish USD). Rather than focus on the high resolution benefits of the current product stack, or perhaps working with a B or C level studio to get a competent DX12 coded game onto the market to demonstrate their technological prowess, AMD are demonstrating the fact that they offer an excellent price to performance ratio (even if the performance per watt is not great). While that does get you something, the reality is that it doesn't translate to sales if you aren't marketing yourself as a value brand. AMD is still trying to be the king of performance, when they could do so much better this generation by selling themselves as the king of value, which will be reaped in the next several years as DX12 actually gains traction.
Is AMD actually focused on the high-end market? I have to ask the question, because it seems like everybody fails to do so. Nvidia has released a high end card with each of the last few generations, which does nothing for most people. Realistically, gaming on a console isn't as great, but when I could have two consoles for less than your single GPU, the cost to performance is pretty screwy. Likewise, the Nano demonstrates a rather unique focus on GPU size, not on massively increased performance. If, as was posed by the OP, Nano was stretched to Fury size and the pricing was reduced what would be on offer? A card that performs very well of the price per watt metric, demonstrates a new memory technology, and might well compete with the 980ti favorably on overclocking performance. Instead, what we receive is a lackluster Fury and a massively priced Nano. It really seems like AMD targeted two traditional market segments, fired everything, and forgot that there might be someone in-between.
In short, I think AMD marketing needs to be fundamentally reworked. There's such a fundamental disconnect between what they are selling, and how they are selling it, that I can't understand how their PR doesn't go home each evening and drink themselves to sleep. Social media pressure is great for low cost items. Traditional reviews are great for higher cost items (this is why Consumer Report and Car & Driver still exist). There's a fundamental stupidity demonstrated in trying to sell one with another though. You won't see Consumer Report passing judgement on deodorant, yet Old Spice has a better marketing engine through viral videos than the objective quality of their product. AMD is trying to be both a modern PR machine, and sell an expensive product. That kind of disconnect is hurting their bottom line more than objective silence on products ever could. Either support your expensive product with traditional reviews, or sell your cheap product with social media campaigns. What you are doing now is just painful to watch.
