Please note that this post is tagged as a rumor .
NVIDIA is making RTX 3080 12GB again
A hardware leaker with good contacts at board partners claims that NVIDIA is now producing RTX 3080 12GB SKU again after stopping it two months ago.
The RTX 3080 12GB was one of the latest models released this year in January. This card was a cosmetic upgrade over the original model with 10GB, but was a needed refresh of the GA102 GPU at the time. The RTX 3090 series were simply too expensive.
Fast forward to August this year, NVIDIA is facing a huge inventory problem with RTX 30 series, there are simply too many cards to sell and too few customers interested in buying a high-end card just 2 months away from next-gen launch.
But as NVIDIA produces more RTX 3090 cards with nearly full GA102 GPU, the company is also getting partially disabled GPUs, which may end up in SKUs such as RTX 3080 Ti or RTX 3080 10/12GB models. According to MEGAsizeGPU, NVIDIA has just started making RTX 3080 12GB cards again. The reason supposedly being the huge stock of GA102 GPUs:
Because there is too much stock of GA102, Nvidia has resumed the supply of 3080 12G.
The 3080 12G just stopped production for less than two months, and recently resumed production quickly.— MEGAsizeGPU (@Zed__Wang) August 14, 2022
NVIDIA can make RTX 3080 12GB cards regardless if the GA102 inventory has enough suitable chips or not. We have seen this many times, when the company repurposed its higher-end GPUs for other models, simply to continue the production of more affordable SKUs. This may lead to lower profits, but NVIDIA will get rid of the GA102 stock one way or the other.
The RTX 3080 12GB features 8960 CUDA cores (+256 over the original), an increased memory size to 12GB and wider memory bus of 320-bit. Interestingly, NVIDIA never announced the MSRP for this card.
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 High-End SKU Specifications | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VideoCardz | RTX 3090 Ti | RTX 3090 | RTX 3080 Ti | RTX 3080 12GB | RTX 3080 (10GB) |
| Picture |  |  |  |  | |
| GPU | GA102-350 | GA102-300 | GA102-225 | GA102-220 | GA102-200 |
| GPU Clusters | 84 | 82 | 80 | 70 | 68 |
| CUDAs | 10752 | 10496 | 10240 | 8960 | 8704 |
| RT Cores | 84 | 82 | 80 | 70 | 68 |
| Tensors/TMUs | 336 | 328 | 320 | 280 | 272 |
| Base Clock | 1560 MHz | 1395 MHz | 1365 MHz | 1260 MHz | 1440 MHz |
| Boost Clock | 1860 MHz | 1695 MHz | 1665 MHz | 1710 MHz | 1710 MHz |
| Memory | 24 GB G6X | 24 GB G6X | 12 GB G6X | 12 GB G6X | 10 GB G6X |
| Bus | 384-bit | 384-bit | 384-bit | 384-bit | 320-bit |
| Memory Clock | 21 Gbps | 19.5 Gbps | 19 Gbps | 19 Gbps | 19 Gbps |
| Bandwidth | 1008 GB/s | 936 GB/s | 912 GB/s | 912 GB/s | 760 GB/s |
| TDP | 450W | 350W | 350W | 350W | 320W |
| MSRP | $1,999 | $1,499 | $1,199 | Not announced | $699 |
| Release Date | January 2022 | September 24th, 2020 | June 3rd, 2021 | January 2022 | September 17th, 2020 |
Source: MEGAsizeGPU