Don't Expect Dual-Chip Fermi Cards Anytime Soon

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Only two days before the launch of NVIDIA’s single-core GeForce GTX 400 series cards, and some are already wondering when will NVIDIA unleash a dual-core graphics card to challenge the Radeon HD 5970 for the title of best graphics card. By all accounts, the Fermi chip looks powerful enough to do so, but we might have to wait a while for NVIDIA to design a spec card that uses dual cores.

Fudzilla had a chat with their sources inside NVIDIA’s manufacturing partners, and they found what you’d expect regarding the possibility of NVIDIA announcing a dual-core GeForce GTX 400 card. After months of Fermi delays, NVIDIA’s manufacturing partners say they’ll be glad once the single-core GeForce GTX 400 series card start shipping. Furthermore, after all these delays and hype over the Fermi chips – NVIDIA’s partners expect that there will be enough demand on the market for any GeForce 400 card.

So, although NVIDIA isn’t facing any partner demand for a dual-core GeForce GTX 495 or what ever they’ll call it, the poor Fermi yields probably aren’t helping matters any. Per what we reported yesterday, NVIDIA’s chip fab – TSMC – is reportedly getting less than 50% yield on the production of Fermi cores. This led NVIDIA to respec the GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 cards to include less cores. When NVIDIA is having to redesign cards for less cores because of a poor yield, they’re not exactly in a position to introduce a dual-GPU monstrosity card.

Speculation on the internet has it that since the Fermi chips are expected to consume a lot of power – a dual-Fermi card would consume way too much power, even for the high-end enthusiast crowd (who often pack 1KW power supplies in their computers these days). It’s possible that a future dual-chip card would use instead use a mobile version of the Fermi chips.

The NVIDIA partners that spoke said that if NVIDIA was to announce a dual-Fermi graphics card, they would expect the earliest it would be announced would be around June 2010 – perhaps around the Computex or E3 trade shows. To bring us back around to reality, NVIDIA’s next-gen DirectX 11 graphics cards, the GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470, are going on sale in two days, on March 26th.