I just don't understand this position that AMD must be the budget champ regardless of performance for the end of time, but NVIDIA and Intel can keep charging how they like. AMD is currently capacity constrained, they are selling basically everything they can get out of TSMC. Cutting prices now would do nothing other than reduce revenue and profit at a time they need every single $ they can get to fund R&D to keep ahead of the Intel/Nvidia juggernauts who are many times AMD's size.
You must understand that in both the CPU and (especially) the GPU market, AMD is either completely unknown or is considered the "off-brand". This is mostly because of Intel's ill-gotten dominance certainly, but it's also because AMD doesn't advertise much, if at all. The name AMD just isn't recognised outside of the gamer and enthusiast circles and while gamers and enthusiasts aren't a small market, we're still tiny compared to commercial, industrial and general-use markets. Dell doesn't make its money selling computers to consumers, it makes its money selling computers to offices and those PCs are almost exclusively Intel-based.
The GPU side is even worse because nVidia is the name that non-enthusiasts recognise. AMD made rather stupid choice to remove the ATi branding from the Radeon GPUs because non-enthusiasts also recognised the ATi name.
AMD has to be the budget choice until they get at least close to parity with Intel an nVidia because market share equals mindshare. Right now, they are nowhere close to that. Even with the fantastic market growth of Ryzen on the Steam survey, they only have about ¼ of the Steam market. In the overall market, I'd say that AMD has maybe 5% because again, pretty much all of the "brand-in-a-box" computers used in the commercial sector are Intel-based.
This is also true about the mobile market in which AMD has only recently started to become competitive (within the last year or so). I would estimate that there are for more people who have never heard of AMD than there are people who have used AMD. To most people in general, AMD is the "off-brand" or "generic" version of Intel. Enthusiasts know that this isn't true but you'll still come across some gamers who think that they're "experts" who ascribe to this fallacy. Just think of how many people don't realise that drive space and memory aren't the same thing. When I worked at Tiger Direct, I used to wince every time I heard someone say that they had 250GB of memory. The general public's level of computer knowledge is about the same level that we have about washers and dryers. Who's going to spend more for a Haier over a Whirlpool? Not many. This is why Hisense bought Sharp. They knew that people would pay more for a TV that said "Sharp" on it than the same TV if it said "Hisense". They wanted the name.
The other thing, you can't write a reasonable article about 'the last time AMD was ahead of intel' without mentioning Intel's illegal practises to shut AMD out from the lucrative OEM business. That was rife during the P4/early Core era and it significantly impacted AMDs ability to grow revenue and profit at a time they were more competitive. I remember in 2008 you could buy a home server from Dell with a Q6600 that was cheaper than buying just the Q6600 from a store, that was how large the subsidies intel was giving Dell in exchange for not using AMD processors. Effectively people were shucking Dell PC's to get the Intel processors because it was cheaper.
I completely agree. It's like talking about WWII and not mentioning the Holocaust or talking about the US Civil War without mentioning slavery. Let's call it what it is, revisionist history.
That then took away from their ability to keep up R&D spend and basically guaranteed that Intel would be able to muscle past. Remember, we are talking about a company (Intel) that until recently was making more profit in a quarter than AMD made revenue in a year, that is how lobsided the market was (and still is to an extent). Getting mad at AMD for trying to increase margin on higher performing parts in that context seems irrational and short sighted.
Let me start by saying that the last Intel CPU I bought was a Core2Duo. After that I've had a Phenom II X4 940, Phenom II X4 965, A8-3500M, FX-8350, R7-1700, R5-3500U and R5-3600X. The last nVidia video card I bought was a Palit GeForce 8500 GT. After that, I've had twin XFX HD 4870 1GBs, an ASUS HD 5450 (HTPC), an XFX HD 6450 (also HTPC), twin Gigabyte Windforce HD 7970s twin Sapphire R9 Fury Nitros and now an XFX RX 5700 XT THICC III. Technically, I have a GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile in my current craptop but it wasn't any more expensive than other craptops without it and the main GPU in my Craptop is a Vega. It's easy to see that I'm no fan of Intel or nVidia.
Having said all that, your point isn't completely valid. This is because AMD still exists. The ATi side has only been non-competitive at the high-end relatively recently, like over the last four years and that was because AMD threw all of their R&D budget at their CPU side because they weren't worried about their GPU side. This is because they had beaten nVidia several times before and in 2015, two of the three most powerful cards in the world were Radeons. ATi had been perennial contenders against nVidia but AMD had not been competitive with Intel since the Phenom II. ATi essentially kept AMD alive between 2013 and 2017 so their GPUs weren't completely outmatched like their CPUs were. This turned out to be a smart move because it resulted in Zen (Ryzen, Threadripper, EPYC).
To do this however, they had to abandon the high-end of the GPU market for a generation or two. It wasn't that big of a deal because they had Polaris which was a great mainstream gaming at a great price. Polaris was going to be AMD's bid to gain market share and mindshare from nVidia through sheer volume. AMD knew that Polaris would be a winner against the GTX 1060 and they had made sure to have a good amount of them.
Then disaster struck in the form of the Crypto-Mining Craze. ATi's GCN architecture was a hybrid compute/gaming GPU and had far superior hash rates compared to nVidia cards, especially in Etherium which was popular at the time. Polaris was also extremely power efficient and the cards were very nicely priced so miners began snapping them up as fast as AMD could make them. This had a two-sided effect for AMD. On the one hand, they were making profit hand-over-fist but they weren't clawing back any consumer market share because the miners were grabbing all of the Polaris cards and ignoring the nVidia equivalent, the aforementioned GTX 1060 because compared to even an RX 470, the GTX 1060 sucked at Etherium mining.
The ultimate result was the exact opposite of what AMD wanted to happen. Sure, they made a crap-tonne of money but gamers didn't get the exposure to the AMD name in GPUs that they were hoping for. In fact, the gaming market has never been so lopsided towards nVidia in their history and this is because people who wanted mainstream gaming cards had no choice but to buy the GTX 1060 since there were no Polaris cards to be had and the prices on them had been inflated by the extreme demand from Etherium miners. If you were to take the GTX 1060 out of the Steam survey, nVidia wouldn't look so dominant.
The mining craze did serious damage to AMD despite the profits they made because of the number of gamers who are now familiar with GeForce instead of Radeon. That's more long-term than a few dollars from miners.
This is how it's supposed to be 
