No I clearly showed how this release matches exactly the Kepler, Maxwell, and Pascal releases, when they released Titan followed months later by x80 Ti of essentially equal performance.
What he, and apparently you, seem to be missing, is that all the x80 Ti cards from all those generations match Titan performance.
For 3080 to be this generations 3080 Ti, it would have to match 3090 (this generations Titan) performance. It clearly does not.
Months from now when yields improve, we will almost certainly get 3080 Ti with 3090 performance.
Both of you are missing the basic relation between Titan and x80 Ti cards. It's not which chips they use. It's x80 Ti delivering Titan performance after yields improve to make it viable.
Actually what your missing is the relationship between the 102 die and the 104 die which has been broken with Ampere.
Normally the 102 is 50% bigger than the 104 die, when looking at CUDA core count. The XX80 Ti is cut down by about 6-8%, thus making it effectively about 40% bigger than the full 104 die.
With Ampere this pattern no longer holds since the GA102 die is a whooping 75% larger than the GA104. So to maintain the normal pattern of the XX80 Ti card being 40% larger than the 104 die, Nvidia have had to cut down the 102 die more than usual. By 20% to be exact, which the 3080 matches almost perfectly by being cut down by 19%, thus making it 42% larger than the full GA104 die. So spec wise the 3080 fits in perfectly as a Ti card n the traditional XX80 to XX80 Ti pattern.
And yes this would make the 3090 as the Titan card significantly bigger than usual relatively speaking. But then again Nvidia has probably had a hard time justifying the position of the Titan cards after they dropped the whole prosumer argument (by dropping double precision support), with memory size thus being the only real differentiator. Now there
Now exactly why the 102 die is 75% larger this time around instead of the normal 50% is anyone's guess. Some rumors were that Nvidia was also planning a 103 die to sit in between the two, but I don't know how reliable those are.
With all that being said even if we ignore all of the above, there's still one fatal flaw with you explanation. If the 3080 fits in with the pattern we saw with Kepler, Maxwell and Pascal, then why in the world did Nvidia price it at $700, the price point occupied by the XX80 TI card in all those generations (except Maxwell which was actually cheaper), instead of the $500-600 that was the historical price of a XX80 card.
Thus if we go with your theory and ignore the underlying specs and die used, and look purely at the market positioning and pricing of the Kepler, Maxwell and Pascal generations, then we are left with the rather unappealing conclusion that Nvidia decided to give us XX80 non-Ti performance at XX80 Ti prices.