Miners are rubbing their hands over the introduction of an NVIDIA RTX 3080 with 12 GB of GDDR6X and a wider 384-bit memory bus. This would increase ETH performance by 20% over the 10 GB model and, in short, would be the answer to Intel’s Arc Alchemist.
NVIDIA isn’t messing around and wants to upgrade its RTX 3000 with more VRAM. The truth is that few gamers can afford the price of current graphics cards, so these products are only interesting for miners who can make a profit on the €1500+ for the RTX 3080. It could hit the market in early 2022.
The news story comes straight from our colleagues at VideoCardz, which recently reported about the 16GB RTX 3070 Ti and now the 12GB GDDR6X RTX 3080. Not only is the VRAM memory being expanded, but this GPU also comes with a 384-bit memory bus that offers higher bandwidth (912GB/s vs 760GB/s).
It is speculated that it could be the fastest GPU in ETH mining, clocking in at 52 MH/s, considering NVIDIA’s LHR series. Under the hood, it was already known that the GPU would be the GA102-220, but the total number of cores was not known, which is now the case: 8960 CUDA cores, which is 256 more than the regular RTX 3080.
Theoretically, this core count was expected for the alleged RTX 3080 SUPER, and we could refer to it even if it hasn’t been made official yet. More cores mean higher power consumption, and it is rumored that the TDP will increase to 340-350 W, which is the range of the RTX 3080 Ti.
However, the RTX 3080 Ti moves at that power consumption because it has even more cores (it’s a capped RTX 3080), but it’s true that we’re looking at the same memory configuration. As usual, we are not informed of the approximate clock speeds, which is left up to the graphics card manufacturers. VideoCardz assumes that the frequencies would be the same as a conventional RTX 3080.
We no longer know if this is the 12 GB RTX 3080 SUPER or “just” a version with more VRAM, CUDA cores, and memory bus. The information we have says that the 12GB RTX 3080 could launch in January 2021, and it’s not known if it will be in the middle or at the end of the month.
The source claims that their own insiders say that there is a significant development on this SKU, so a new RTX 3000 is imminent to meet higher demands, but it will still be prohibitively expensive.
On the other hand, it’s worth noting that NVIDIA has prioritized the RTX 3090 Ti for launch in the Amp family in early 2022. What we don’t know is the RTX 3050, which will be released soon.