A16 vs RTX 3080

The RTX 3080 produces 59.5 TFLOPS dense FP16 performance which exceeds the A16 dense FP16 figure of 17.9 TFLOPS by a factor of 3.3. The same pattern holds for sparse figures where the RTX 3080 reaches 119 TFLOPS with sparsity versus 35.9 TFLOPS with sparsity on the A16. Training workloads that rely on dense FP16 therefore finish faster on the RTX 3080 while inference tasks using the same dense FP16 metric also complete more quickly on that card. Memory bandwidth of 760 GB/s on the RTX 3080 supports larger batch sizes than the 200 GB/s bandwidth available on the A16. FP32 performance follows the same ratio with the RTX 3080 at 29.8 TFLOPS against 4.5 TFLOPS on the A16.

The A16 suits deployments that prioritize the 250W TDP over higher throughput. Workloads that fit within 16 GB GDDR6 and require only 17.9 TFLOPS dense FP16 benefit from the lower power draw relative to the 320W TDP of the RTX 3080.

The RTX 3080 suits workloads that need the 59.5 TFLOPS dense FP16 rating or the 760 GB/s memory bandwidth. Applications that scale with the 29.8 TFLOPS FP32 rating or the 238 TOPS dense INT8 rating also favor the RTX 3080 over the A16.