How the tables have turned since the and bulldozer days
Jim Keller might be doing just that with Intel right now. I only hope whatever they come up with, AMD is ready and able to keep up. Otherwise we're going to see a rerun of the following period too: Intel tweaking the same architecture for years at a time, and squeezing low single digit performance improvements that come with questionable security sacrifices and deeply unpleasant sticker prices.
This time around though Intel isn't in the same position at all to dictate to major market players for a variety of reasons. The current big lucky break catapulting AMD way into the lead is certainly temporary, but it does seem like they'll be able to gain some real marketshare and attention. That will hopefully serve to make this time around end up in a much more stable back and forth.
So AMD (or rather, their RTG division specifically) would be remiss not to align their price/perf with Nvidia to maximize profit.
A reason why they'll probably stay 'cheaper' to some extent for some time (perhaps long) is that they don't compete against CUDA, Nvidia's silver bullet. And don't just think “muh fancy library”, think hordes of engineers that Nvidia has the financial muscle to deploy in the field, 'lending' them to customers who need ad hoc driver work, custom implementations, general help, and what-have-you.
CUDA is a war machine, because that's how Nvidia operates its strategy.
It's how they owned the video game market back then, and I'm pretty sure they do the same with CUDA / ML / compute (why wouldn't they).
I thought that OpenCL would eventually be to CUDA what Vulkan is becoming to DirectX (btw: thank you, Linux); but it seems to me that OpenCL is going the way of the dodo? (still very little support in all ML/compute software I encounter, anecdotally).
AMD can sell a ton of GPU at good price, and they should, but they're lagging behind because optimized software libraries support (CUDA, the whole commercial hammer it represents) is where it's at.
Fortunately or not for them, Intel's graphics efforts seem to be... hype, more than a truly organized effort (insiders leaks speak of a terrible, terrible political / manegerial / organization situation at Intel's). It's fortunate for AMD's graphics market share, but it's unfortunate in that Intel would be a major support for OpenCL (last I checked, at least) and Intel's rise on that market could have taken AMD's hardware along with it in a tsunami of competition for CUDA.
But that's not happening soon, apparently.
And maybe an even larger demand from coin miners.
The desktop customer might not matter that much for GPU makers.
It would be nice to see more companies releasing GPUs like it was in the '90s.
Jim Keller has said he is technically the manager for thousands of people now and that they are working on even more IPC with even bigger out of order buffers. Even so I don't see the same leap being made in power and single threaded performance.
Then again apple has an incredible amount of performance per watt in their cpus, so I don't know where the limits really are.
So basically Jim Keller is competing with himself.
After working at Intel we might see him again at AMD.