During the company’s quarterly conference call, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang admitted to analysts that the company would not begin ramping shipments of their Fermi GPU until Q1 of the 2010 calendar year.

“Next year it is going to be an interesting first quarter because, in fact, we will need more wafers than ever in Q1. The reason for that is because–and I mean more 40nm wafers than ever in Q1–we are […] fully ramping Fermi for three different product lines: GeForce, Quadro and Tesla,” said Huang.

Huang’s Q1 statement refers to the company’s fiscal year which runs from January 26 until January 25 of the following year. NVIDIA’s schedule is approximately one year ahead of the calendar year, so the period of 26 January, 2010 until 26 April, 2010 represents the company’s first quarter in fiscal year 2011. This window also happens to be the same timeline we predicted on Wednesday for Fermi’s official debut.

The announcements came as part of an overall strong showing from NVIDIA in the company’s third quarter. The company posted a 16% increase in QOQ revenue to $903.2 million, while YOY standings rose slightly from $897.7 million at this time last year. Year over year, the company’s GAAP net income rose from $61.7 million to $107.6 million.

“We continued to make progress in the third quarter with healthy market demand across the board. Revenue was up from a year ago, with improvement in each of our PC, professional solutions and consumer businesses,” Huang said. “It’s great to see us shipping orders with our Tegra mobile-computing solution, and growing enthusiasm for our Tesla platform for parallel computing in the server and cloud-computing markets.”

It’s a well-known fact that Intel and NVIDIA are not the best of friends. Between icing their chipset biz and going to war in courts, Intel has spent the last two years showing NV the powder. Rather than take it lying down, ol’ green has fired back with a satire blog, of all things.

The blog has actually been up since late September; it claims to be a “a parody of events occurring within the semiconductor sector, with particular focus on its largest, and most-commented-upon competitor.” While most people would immediately think chief rival AMD, NVIDIA’s blind rage puts Intel on that podium instead.

Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, we couldn’t help but try our hand at it too.

Rumors have resurfaced that NVIDIA is looking to support its business by branching into the production of x86 processors.

Speaking on behalf of Broadpoint AmTech, Analyst Doug Freedman said, “We believe Nvidia could enter the x86 CPU business. Nvidia could become a supplier of x86 CPUs by necessity to preserve both GPU and chipset revenue.”

He continued: ”We believe that Nvidia has hired former Transmeta staff extensively, and that instruction code ‘morphing’ requirements have declined as more x86 instructions have come off of patent coverage.”

Transmeta was a company that specialized in ULV processors branded with the Crusoe, and later the Efficeon names. The Crusoe and Efficeon processors differed from traditional CPUs in that the order and manner in which they executed x86 code was handled by software, an architectural design known as Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW).

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Recent reports from unofficial sources contradict official statements from NVIDIA which say that the company’s upcoming Fermi/G300 GPU will be available by the end of the calendar year.

Unnamed board partners cited at DriverHeaven and [H]ard|OCP claim that NVIDIA is working to have “some” Fermi sample boards running at the January, 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The implication here is that NVIDIA may very well miss that window to demonstrate working silicon to the public.

"0935A1" - WW35/09 A1 silicon (Image credit: PC Watch)

Of greater concern is the overall state of the Fermi project. If the company is hoping, rather than guaranteeing, to show the first public demo of Fermi in the second week of January, then the G300 may be further behind than anyone had imagined.

After the project slipped its original September/October launch, many believed that G300 would launch in the November/December time frame. That date was based on a July tape-out of the company’s A1 (first) G300 revision.

A tape-out is the finalization of a PCB/IC design; it is at this point that the schematics for the product are sent for manufacture. It typically takes about five months to translate the specs into a physical product. This is why a year-end G300 launch was expected from a July tape-out.

However, a tape-out is not always the last stage of circuit design. The design could fail viability checks at the foundry, or the production board may fail functionality checks in its shakedown cruise. Should either of these scenarios unfold, the circuit designer must commit itself to a new revision–a respin–which takes about 4-6 weeks from debugging to the very first test boards. Should that revision get a green light, you can add another 6-8 weeks for production boards.

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Digitimes is reporting that the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) is once again experiencing yield issues on the 40nm process node.

TSMC said it has seen yield rates for its 40nm node drop to 40% due chamber matching issues. Main customers for TSMC’s 40nm processes are GPU vendors AMD, which recently launched its new 40nm-based Radeon 5870 series, and Nvidia, who is scheduled to launch its 40nm-based GT300 series of chips in December, according to previous reports. TSMC’s recent issues may impact the shipping schedules of the GPU vendors, market watchers commented.

In addition to shipping schedules, the standing MSRPs of 40nm GPUs may also be compromised. Indeed, rumors have already begun to churn that the Radeon HD 5850’s price will soon increase as demand continues to outstrip supply.

NVIDIA has released an SLI profile update which adds SLI support for several new titles, while enhancing performance in Champions Online and Dragon-Age: Origins.

Titles with fresh SLI support include:

• Borderlands
• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
• G-Force
• FIFA Soccer 2010
• League of Legends: Clash of Fates
• NHL 2009
• Order of War
• Pro Evolution Soccer 2010
• Race On
• Star Trek: D-A-C

The update weighs approximately 300kb and should be combined with ForceWare version 191.07.

After an OEM-only soft launch in July, NVIDIA has finally entered the 40nm game with a pair of 40nm GPUs in the retail channel.

Called the GeForce GT 220 and 210, respectively, the new cards are a die-shrunk version of the G200b core that powers adapters like the GTX 275.

As the table illustrates, the new goods are nothing to write home about. On paper, both of them are slower than the rustic GeForce 9600 GT, but they are the company’s first DirectX 10.1 and SM4.1 products.

The 220 also features an onboard audio controller for 7.1 sound via HDMI, so some may find the card useful for HTPC applications.

The GeForce GT 210

The GeForce GT 210 ($44.99) and the 220 ($69.99) are available from your favorite etailer immediately.

This week I retreated to the safety of my home where I cannot be bothered by Dunigan and his boozing antics. I also come bearing a beard; get your man on, Icrontic.

NVIDIA talked and gave us some goods regarding their stance on Bullet Physics. Left 4 Dead 2 is pulling in an incredible amount of preorders and is on track to be one of Valve’s best selling titles yet.

Also, big news with [redacted], so definitely don’t miss that! Thrax tells us how to upgrade from RC to RTM once Windows 7 is released, and the final boss of Icrontic, Primesuspect, is chosen to be on the judging panel for Last Gadget Standing at CES 2010. Finally, I have an old Dell, and it is no longer working.

If it’s Friday, it’s Mind of UPSLynx.

The great Fudzilla is reporting that the successor to the acclaimed ION netbook/nettop chipset will launch by the end of the year.

“Nvidia’s chipset boss has confirmed that the company is on track to start shipping its Ion 2 chipset in 2009. He didn’t go into details telling about any specific designs as this depends on the customers,” he writes.

We last heard word on the ION 2 in July when it was rumored that the chipset would be doubling shader performance over current ION products. It is still believed that the product will undergo a die shrink and take the shader count up to 32, making for an overall improvement in both thermals and performance.

Slashgear is reporting that some of NVIDIA’s chipset business is being put on hiatus as a result of ongoing disputes with Intel regarding the Nehalem.

NVIDIA’s Platform Products Representative said that while the company will continue to develop for Atom and AMD products, the courts will dictate the future when it comes to the Core i7.

“We will continue to innovate integrated solutions for Intel’s FSB architecture. We firmly believe that this market has a long healthy life ahead,” he said.

“But because of Intel’s improper claims to customers and the market that we aren’t licensed to the new DMI bus and its unfair business tactics, it is effectively impossible for us to market chipsets for future CPUs. So, until we resolve this matter in court next year, we’ll postpone further chipset investments for Intel DMI CPUs.

Those DMI CPUs are none other than Intel’s range of Lynnfield processors which launched in September to shore up Intel’s value segments.

The statement is also supported by NVIDIA’s Corporate Communications Lead Bob Sherbin, who reported to PC Magazine that Intel was to blame when it came to Intel chipset development woes.

“We have said that we will continue to innovate integrated solutions for Intel’s FSB architecture. We firmly believe that this market has a long healthy life ahead,” Sherbin said.

“But because of Intel’s improper claims to customers and the market that we aren’t licensed to the new DMI bus and its unfair business tactics, it is effectively impossible for us to market chipsets for future CPUs. So, until we resolve this matter in court next year, we’ll postpone further chipset investments.”

Intel and NVIDIA have been locked in a legal battle regarding chipset rights since February; it is strongly believed that the firm has prepared chipsets in the event of a victory.

Last Wednesday, AMD announced a partnership with Pixelux Entertainment to develop an open source physics initiative called Bullet Physics. The new API is being written in the vendor-neutral OpenCL and DirectCompute languages; that means games which use Bullet could run physics on ATI and NVIDIA cards alike.

We know what AMD’s perspective on the new initiative would be, so we turned to NVIDIA to get their thoughts on what Bullet meant to them and the market at large. We heard from NVIDIA’s Director Technical Marketing, Tom Petersen.

Icrontic: Does NVIDIA intend to support Bullet Physics, as it is based on open industry standards which NVIDIA supports?

Tom Petersen: NVIDIA does support Bullet (we met with Erwin at [The GPU Technology Conference]). We like any software or API that makes it easier for anyone to use GPUs more effectively. As a matter of fact according to Erwin (the creator of Bullet) he uses NV GPUs to develop his code – He even provided a quote for us to that effect:

“Bullet’s GPU acceleration via OpenCL will work with any compliant drivers, we use NVIDIA GeForce cards for our development and even use code from their OpenCL SDK, they are a great technology partner.”

Erwin Coumans,
Creator of the Bullet Physics Engine

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NVIDIA has taken the wraps off of the newest driver revision for GeForce 100, 200, 6000, 7000, 8000, 9000 GPUs. Weighing in at roughly 100MB, this WHQL-certified Windows XP/Vista/7 driver delivers the following changes:

• Adds support for OpenGL 3.2 for ION, GeForce 100, 200, 8000 and 9000-series GPUs.
• Big anti-aliasing or SLI performance improvements for a handful of titles.
• For graphics cards supporting multiple clock states, 3D clocks correctly return to 2D clocks after exiting a 3D application. This will have big power savings for impacted users.
• Adds support for DirectX 11’s DirectCompute (Compute Shaders) API on GeForce 8000, 9000, 100 and 200 GPUs.
• Added support for 3D Vision Discover, a feature to enable stereoscopic 3D for games.

This is a fairly important release, particularly due to the inclusion of the DirectCompute API. Note that this does not mean the compatible GPUs are DX11-ready; DirectCompute merely requires stream processors, and all recent GPUs have them. It can be expected that ATI will do the same thing with their next driver release.

Download

Windows Vista & 7 x86-32: Here
Windows Vista & 7 x86-64: Here
Windows XP x86-32: Here
Windows XP x86-64: Here