NVIDIA Suffers Supply Issues [Taiwan Suppliers Cause 40nm Delays, Fermi Cards Pushed Back To May]

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Last week, we reported on a rumor that NVIDIA’s hotly anticipated (and oft-delayed) Fermi DirectX 11-capable GPUs would be released in March, after the CeBIT computer trade show in Germany. In a conference call last week, NVIDIA’s CEO revealed that while they’ll begin production of the cards in Q1 (January to April), supply issues cause them to delay “ramp[ing] up” production until May 2010.

NVIDIA has been having a lot of supply issues lately. While they had a great Q4 2009, they also lost $150 million in profit because of a lack of supply of 40nm chips. During their earnings conference call, NVIDIA revealed that their long-time primary Taiwanese supplier TSMC had failed to make shipments, and robbed NVIDIA of income.

However, NVIDIA didn’t put it quite like that, and they also added that TSMC was doing a “fabulous job” on improving their yields. TSMC was at the center of a controversy last year when their failure to correctly manufacture 40nm dies caused a stir-up on the tech blogs.

NVIDIA just can’t seem to catch a break lately. The American graphics giant went into the DirectX 11-generation with a lead over competitor ATI. They announced their Fermi Dx11 GPU only after ATI had begun shipping Dx11 cards. Now, the Fermi-powered GeForce 400 series has suffered another public delay. While NVIDIA hasn’t shipped a single Dx11 card, ATI has shipped over 2,000,000 of their Radeon HD 5000 series card.

Some tech pundits have speculated that NVIDIA will officially launch their DirectX 11-capable GeForce GTX 470 and 480 cards in March or April, but the cards will not be available on a mass scale until May.

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