No smoke without fire. It feels like yesterday we told you about the gloomy outlook of NVIDIA’s new graphics circuit architecture Fermi painted SemiAccurate. Even if little of what was said in the article could be confirmed that we urged caution. NVIDIA has indirectly confirmed problems with the chip. During a conference call VP Jen-Hsun Huang announced that the first Fermi products will launch April 31.
Jen-Hsun Huang revealed that it will launch a span of Fermi products in fiscal Q1 2011 in the form of GeForce, Quadro and Tesla. Fiscal Q1 2011 started January 31 2010 and will end April 31st 2010. But even though the launch is said to happen before the end of the quarter we should not expect any mentionable quantities of GeForce GTX 480 before Q2, which starts in May and ends in July.
At the same time, NVIDIA implied that it has no big plans for the budget and mid-range segments since these users “hardly demand new functionality.” TSMC’s 40nm process is a key element to NVIDIA’s movement down the product segments. Something that was kind of a rant in the aforementioned article by SemiAccurate and this worries us. It’s not often you see NVIDIA admitting … well anything really.
Two Fermi-based NVIDIA GF100 graphics cards in the same system … later this year hopefully
We still don’t know the exact products that will be launched, nor the date. We’re not certain which buyers will be prioritized when all product families are launched. With limited retail availability we can only assume that NVIDIA will make sure to fill any demand among professional users foremost.
“At the same time, NVIDIA implied that it has no big plans for the budget and mid-range segments since these users “hardly demand new functionality.””
Nvidia is right, I mean who seriously buys mid-range cards anymore? I guess we’ll just have to ignore all the people who own an 8800gt (and it’s 13 variants) or hd 4850. Oh wait…
Wonder if they mean GTX285 will the new mid-range and GTX260 the new budget alternative.
But I kind of see what they’re aiming for with not launching a new lower-end Fermi. Hugely expensive and yeilds are low (my guess). And if GTX 480 ever makes it out to media and is a success, people will buy nVidia products regardless if it’s a Fermi or an older GT200 or G90/b build.