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I highly doubt that Nvidia dropped the ball this hard with Pascal.

A much more obvious and sensible conclusion is that Nvidia is currently developing their next chip, called Volta. We already know that the Department of Energy contracted Nvidia and IBM (lots and lots of money) to provide a good Volta GPU + POWER9 CPU combo for the new Summit and Sierra supercomputers set for completion in 2017.[1] This means that Nvidia knew since 2014 (at least) that they'd have very little time between their Pascal release and the more pressing Volta release. It's been their roadmap for a while now.

The Fermi, Kepler, and Maxwell architectures each had two or three years between them. Pascal and Volta are set to have a year or less.

1: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8727/nvidia-ibm-supercomputers