> The market for prosumer cards with high VRAM and low FLOPS would be negligibly small. The data center market is massive on one end and the gaming market is big on the other. Casual consumers who just want a lot of VRAM are such a small minority of people that it doesn’t matter to the bottom line.
I'm sure this is also what AMD is thinking, and it's also why they will never catch up to NVidia in ecosystem and software support.
It's not for the casual consumers, and it's not supposed to make money directly! You want these high VRAM SKUs to attract enthusiast and researchers. I have read a staggering amount of research papers where the authors used some random consumer NVidia GPU. Do you know how many I've read which used AMD GPUs? Big fat ZERO! You want to incentivize these people to use your hardware? You want to get devs to support your platform? Give them a unique value proposition that the competition won't.
I'm currently waiting for the 5090 to be available, and I'm going to buy two of them. If AMD would have released a GPU at a fair price, with reasonable performance and double the VRAM that NVidia offers, do you know what would I do? I would buy two AMD cards instead, port my software to it, and contribute PRs to any upstream software that I use so that it works with these cards. But alas, here we are.