The gist of the article is that NVIDIA and AMD are focusing on the halo tier at the exclusion of all else and pricing their cards in an effort to maintain cryptoboom margins in the face of crypto collapsing like a neutron star (for the third time).

If you needed a sub-$900 card today, your options are 1) pay $100-$200 over MSRP for RTX 30 stock, 2) try to snag RDNA2 products before the remaining stock pool evaporates, 3) hope most of your games use DX12 or Vulkan on ARC.

Adding to that, performance gains have basically flatlined at the sub $400 price point. $380 in 2016 got you a GTX 1070. $300 in 2023 gets you...OCed GTX 1070 performance from AMD and NVIDIA. Intel shines here when a game gets along well with their drivers. When a game doesn't, you get performance on par with a GTX 1050 Ti.

$200 gets you cards that aren't even as perfomant as the $200 options from 7 years ago.

Eh...kinda.

Yes, automakers dumped their future chip orders. However, those were and are fabbed on legacy nodes. You know the 14nm node Intel was stuck on for 8 years? That's still 10-20 years newer than what most automotive ICs are made on. And as it so happens, the fabs that make automotive ICs are also the same fabs that make industrial ICs (lots of cross over in terms of physical requirements). Compounding that more, of all of the facilities that specialize in legacy nodes, one burnt to the ground last year (Renesas).

Automakers probably wish their ICs were made on contemporary nodes at this point, because Samsung's 8nm node only has like two customers and people are moving away from TSMC 7nm to 6nm, 5nm, and 3nm on the bleeding edge.