Yes Bali was the next gen architecture and incredibly scalable. It consisted of many different chips connected together in a network that could scale. The R chip was so big existing tools couldn't handle it and ppl were writing their own tools. As a result it was very expensive to tape out so many hefty chips and I think that's why when it came time, and with a financial crisis, upper management pulled the plug.
Yes there were separate teams working on the lower-end graphics.
Yes there were separate teams working on the lower-end graphics.