I don’t think it’s accurate to say they’re copying NVidia’s lead. On the mid range it’s been segregated on memory and bus width for a very long time. Your 1060

I don’t think it’s accurate to say they’re copying NVidia’s lead. On the mid range it’s been segregated on memory and bus width for a very long time. Your 1060 is a good example actually. The standard GDDR5 versions have a reduced die with six memory controllers vs eight on the 1070 and 1080. The 1060 GDDR5X version a cut down version of the same die as the 1080 and with two memory controllers turned off. The odd sizes of 3 and 6 gigs of memory is due to the way they segmented their chips to have a 192bit bus on the 1060 vs the 256bit bus on the top end. The 5GB version is further chopped down to 160bit. Those parts competed with the RX480 with 8GB of memory so NVidia was behind AMD at that price point. AMD had not been competing with the *80/Ti cards at this point for a few generations and stuck with that strategy through today though the results have gotten better SKU to SKU. And you’re quite right they don’t want these chips in the data center and at some point they didn’t really want these cards competing in games with the top end when placed in SLI (when that was a thing) as they removed the connector from the mid range.