Ehhhh, not really, but the release seems a bit different this time around. The 1080 Founders Edition and 1080 Ti FE cards both debuted at $700 USD. (The 1080 Ti was released nearly a year later.) This puts it closer to the now released 2080 FE, which is $800 USD.

The 2080 Ti FE, however, is in a league closer to the Titan X/Xp, which were at $1,200. Also they're releasing the highest-end Ti edition at the same time as the ordinary version, which is a first for Nvidia, I think? (The Titan Xp was also launched after, not concurrently, with the 10xx series...) I think the concurrent launch of the 2080 Ti with the ordinary variant means they're positioning it more like an alternative to the Xp, while the non-Ti variants are closer to the ordinary gaming cards you'd normally get. In other words, for people willing to blow their price/perf budget a bit more.

For DL workloads the 1080 Ti is very cost effective (vs the Xp), so it remains to be seen which variant will have the better bang/buck ratio for those uses. I suspect the fact these include Tensor Cores at their given price point will probably be a major selling point regardless of the exact model choice, especially among hobbyist DL users. The RTX line will almost certainly be better in terms of price/perf for local DL work, no matter the bloated margins vs older series.

They may also be keeping prices a bit inflated, besides margins, so they can keep selling older stock and pushing it out. The 9xx series, as you said, continued to sell for a while after 10xx was released. I expect the same will be true this time around, too, especially with prices being so high.

> Ehhhh, not really

Ehhh, yes really.

1080 FE $699 USD 2080 FE $799 USD

That qualifies as almost the same price in my book. By and large, not a 70-90% price increase as being suggested.

Unless you want to explain how 700-800 is a 70-90% price increase?

Tensor cores are great for inferencing; for training their support is still a bit shaky, last time I checked.

Tensor cores (e.g. SIMD matrix FMAs) are extremely useful for training. There is nothing shaky about it.

I do not get why you're being so bizarrely negative about this card. Yes, there are an enormous number of applications, for both training and inference, where an 11GB ridiculously powerful card (both in OPS and in memory speed) can be enormously useful.

Yes, I agree, tensor cores are awesome, if your framework of choice doesn't have some rough edges you inevitably hit when you try to do advanced models on e.g. V100, but which work just fine on TPU. I think the presented Turing card is a masterpiece, just given I was hitting 11GB limit with some semantic segmentation and multi-object detection a year ago, I am obviously disappointed that this wasn't increased, and I am forced to buy RTX 5000 instead ($2300) or used K80/P40. Also, for a gaming card outside a few RTX games I doubt it will give adequate value to gamers that expected 144Hz or faster VR and similar goodies. For raytracing and as a fusion of RT and DL it's truly redefining computer graphics.

Tensors cores were built for training. For inference they added the int8 instructions (dp4a) which have lower precision. The Turing also has int4, and for inference this card blows the Volta out of the water since the v100 was only ~TOPS for int8. The Turing is 250 TOPS for int8 and 500 TOPS for int4.

Which 10x0 FE did cost $1200? Did I miss something?

1080 FE $699 USD 2080 FE $799 USD

That qualifies as about the same price in my book, and not a 70-90% jump.

As for the Ti price when 1080 series was released, there was none.