NVIDIA reportedly resumes the production of GeForce RTX 3080 12GB GPUs after stopping it 2 months ago

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:

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 384-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