Developing purpose built customized hardware like nVidia’s Tensor cores is expensive and time consuming. AMD doesn’t have the cash flow to currently undertake that degree of research. Their loans are a noose and they need them gone before they can really start that undertaking. They need them gone fast because if they take too long and fall too far behind their cash flow will dwindle and they won’t be able to afford the research. That’s another reason why getting the consoles was such a big deal for AMD they have secured the standard for games for the next 5 years so even if they don’t have RT they have ensured that any PC game that is also getting a console launch only has it as an added feature not a core one. So it gives them time to catch up and control the flow to some degree.I never said AMD never benefited from the mining craze. Also, from what I remember the miners were buying up AMD cards like crazy with Nvidia being second fiddle. So much so that ASRock started to make AMD GPU's specifically for mining. There was a reason why Nvidia GPU's were cheaper compared to AMD during the mining craze. Why you think the RX 480's and 580's are everywhere on Ebay? They were used for mining and now the mining market is dead.
Citation needed.
The way I see it, since AMD's GPU market share is pathetically low then selling hardware cheap to Sony and Microsoft is better than not selling anything at all. There are plenty of people who would only buy an Nvidia GPU but have no problem with a Playstation or Xbox console. In that case AMD banks.
I don't know what AMD's gameplan is and I don't think even AMD knows it. Lisa Su wants AMD to stop looking like the lower priced alternative, but they have a long way to go before they can ask for an equal price compared to Nvidia. As of right now the GPU's AMD offers are faster for a lower price, with Ray-Tracing missing. The problem is they aren't fast enough to justify the slight price decrease while not offering Ray-Tracing.