News AMD Teases RX 6000 Performance: Big Navi Looks close to the RTX 3080

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The willingness to pay was something that also surprised Christian Königsegg (founder of the car maker Koenigsegg) when he began his career.
He was almost embarrased to charge a reasonable (based on the actual production cost) about $350,000 for his first car model. Now he can charge five times as much and still sell out in no time. One customer was willing to pay an additional $1.5M to have some special aerodynamic feature developed for one single car.

Perhaps a matter of semantics...
I think that

1. AMD expected Ampere to be even better performing.
2. Underestimated their own abilities.

So beating just the RTX 3070 wasn't what they really wanted, but what they saw as a realistic goal.
As Jarred pointed out:
The 80% performance increase they've achieved is almost crazy, and thus probably beyond their own expectations (at the start of the project)!

I am aware of Konigsegg but I didn't know that about him, that's really funny!

You could be right about ATi underestimating themselves (even AMD refers to the GPU side internally as ATi). After over ten years of GCN, I guess that can happen. Having the budget to work on two separate architectures that are optimised for their specific tasks (CDNA/RDNA) is something that ATi has sorely missed. GCN was a jack-of-all-trades but it was facing master-of-gaming GeForce and master-of-compute Quadro. It did rather well against GeForce but the disappearance of FirePro (dedicated compute architecture) had to really hurt.