The purported 20GB RTX 3080 Ti may be scrapped, Nvidia repurposing to RTX 3090

When an individual named "isoO", a member of the hardwareLUXX forum, took apart his RTX 3090 Founders Edition's cooler to attach some water cooling kit to it, he was surprised to see that his 3090's die was remarked to an ID that read "GA102-300-A1" from the initial ID "GA102-250-KD-A1". It is known that the 'GA102-300-A1' ID belongs to the RTX 3090 while the "GA102-250-KD-A1" was found to be a chip with the same core configuration but with a reworked memory interface (via @kopite7kimi) to accommodate 4GB less memory. Hence, while both the chips packed 10,496 CUDA cores, the 'GA102-250-KD-A1' variant would have 20GB of GDDR6X.

GPU die shot of a supposed RTX 3080 Ti repurposed to RTX 3090

In fact, this wasn't the first GA102-250 chip that was discovered. A non-KD version dubbed the "GA102-250-A1" was also dug out by the same Twitter user about a week prior which had 9,984 CUDA cores and 12GB of GDDR6X memory across a 384-bit wide bus. It is possible that Nvidia was pondering between these two configurations before finalizing the specifications of the RTX 3080 Ti and may have eventually dropped the idea of the 12GB model when it found that rival AMD had released the RX 6800 series with 16 gigs of VRAM as competitors to its 10GB RTX 3080.

	RTX 3080	RTX 3080 Ti 12GB	RTX 3080 Ti 20GB	RTX 3090
GPU ID	GA102-200-KD-A1	GA102-250-A1	GA102-250-KD-A1	GA102-300-A1
CUDA Cores	8,704	9,984	10,496	10,496
Memory Interface	320-bit	384-bit	320-bit	384-bit
Memory Capacity	10GB GDDR6X	12GB GDDR6X	20GB GDDR6X	24GB GDDR6X
Memory Clock	19 Gbps	N/A	19 Gbps	19.5 Gbps

While we can't say for sure, it is likely that the severe ongoing graphics card shortage led to the abandoning of the 20GB RTX 3080 Ti too. There simply may not be enough chips to launch another GPU with a cut-down VRAM configuration and Nvidia may have instead opted to repurpose those (via @VideoCardz) to RTX 3090 models instead.