There will most certainly be a 4050, a slightly slower 107 die, since 4060 is the full die and that is impossible to maintain at high yields. even the 4080 is gimped by 4 SMs. So stop with the renaming interpretations already. It's the new normal. As far as we know the only renamed card is the 4080 12, the rest is as intended. Just buy and have fun. Until 2025 who knows what could happen.
The die size of the 4060 is a mere 158.7mm2 according to Tom's hardware. Tiny for a GPU. Just for comparison, Apple's M2 chip has a die size of 141.7mm2 and the chip has been in production for a year now.
Given that the M2 is the smallest product in their stack below the ultra and max and has been sold en mass, it's safe to say by extension that yield is not an issue at this die size on TSMC's latest nodes. Apple is even coming out with chips larger than this 4060 on the more advanced TSMC 3nm shortly.
What's almost impossible is to have bad yields with such a small die, TSMC's processes would have to be catastrophically bad for that to happen, something we know isn't true as I just illustrated. Chances are Nvidia is yielding 95%+ perfect 4060 dies per wafer.
People calling this a 4050 are being generous IMO. Even if you factor in that the 3050 has only 71% of the full die's shaders enabled, if you multiply that by the die size you get an effective die area (the figure that excludes deactivated parts of the die) of 195.96. So at the end of the day you are still getting more effective die area with a 3050 than you are with the 4060. You could very well make an argument that it's between a 4030 and 4050.
Just buy and have fun. Until 2025 who knows what could happen.
Surely you jest? Anyone who's been through the recent pandemic would know that just buying a video card and having fun has become a complicated matter.
Your sentiment is an appeal to emotion, in that we should just forget all the things that have happened and the horrendous pricing of video cards and buy buy buy without a second thought. My sentiment is the opposite, in that I'm going to point out precisely everything that's wrong with the pricing and the cards themselves. We as enthusiasts have a duty to hold these companies to account not only for our own sake but for everyone in the market. There are many non-enthusiasts who aren't vocal that are price sensitive. The deterioration of value in the GPU market could easily lead to PC loosing it's status as the top platform. Of course in general you shouldn't need a reason to point out a bad product or pricing. The specs and price speak for themselves, the contextualization of that data just makes it apparent.