NVIDIA Keeps Fermi Under Wraps At CeBIT [NVIDIA's Gestapo In Full Force At CeBIT, GeForce 400 Series To Be "Best Gaming GPU Ever"]

NVIDIA’s next-generation Fermi graphics cores have gone on such a long journey of delays, rumored release dates and alleged design flaws that if they were a new Apple product, it’d be the stuff of internet legend. The latest NVIDIA news comes from last week’s CeBIT show in Germany.

that the CeBIT show is a large gathering where many of NVIDIA’s manufacturing partners were – sources are reporting that NVIDIA took the opportunity to hand out samples of Fermi to their many production partners. However, NVIDIA was strict on these samples, telling the partners “not to show them around or allow photos.”

NVIDIA’s secret police has some power apparently, too. Website Fudzilla reports that after an employee of a manufacturing partner was seen showing people the Fermi card sample, NVIDIA’s secret police complained so much to his employer that he was ‘sacked’.

Of course, it’s a bit odd that NVIDIA would be this paranoid about not allowing pictures and keeping Fermi so quiet. It’s not a new cell phone or game console where seeing a leaked prototype is exciting. If NVIDIA had just given out samples of the GPU chip – that’s nothing special, we’ve all seen processors before. Even if it had a cooler and PCB board, that’s even less special – who cares what the cooler looks like.

After all of these epic delays, it now appears that Fermi is on its way to being released near the end of this month. Some of the delays were allegedly because Fermi was being used in a US government supercomputer project and those Fermi ships were faulty, but NVIDIA quickly debunked those rumors.

In a statement, again Fudzilla reporting, NVIDIA said that the Fermi GPU was “designed from the ground up to deliver the best performance on DX11.” He goes on to list a number of new engineering changes to the Fermi processor, and adds “…all of these changes took longer than we originially [sic] anticipated and that’s why we are delayed. [...] based on all the changes we made will [Fermi] be the best gaming GPU every built? Absolutely.”

The GeForce 400-series of graphics cards, which will be powered by Fermi GPUs, are set to be released on March 26th, 2010, with no word on pricing.