Fermi Chips Facing Serious Supply Issues

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After months of delays, NVIDIA’s next-gen DirectX-11 cards, the Fermi-powered GeForce 400 series have finally been officially launched, but the cards are currently out in very short supply. The cards are expected to be generally available after mid-April, but now reports coming from NVIDIA’s manufacturing partners say that the Fermi supply line might be very tight for a while.

According to an unnamed NVIDIA partner who spoke to website Fudzilla, NVIDIA put no limits on how many of the Fermi chips their partners could order before the launch of the device. So many partners ordered considerable amounts of the chips to produce large amounts of the GeForce GTX 470 and 480 graphics cards for launch. Following suit, the partners made large amounts of cards for order to the distributors, who in turn, offered to sell a lot of cards to the various retailers.]

As we reported two weeks ago, the Fermi chips are getting a poor yield in the production fab. NVIDIA was already forced to cut shader cores from the reference spec for the GTX 470 and 480 and due to the poor yield, they can’t meet their orders for the chips that they overpromised. Many NVIDIA partners aren’t happy as they supposedly ordered these chips before NVIDIA even announced the name of the GeForce GTX 470 and 480 cards.

As you can imagine, a supply shortage at NVIDIA’s end is causing a massive supply shortage everywhere. If you’re in the market for a GTX 470 or 480, you be should prepared to buy one if you see it in stock anywhere, as these cards could be hard to find for a while.

One partner that won’t be getting Fermi chips for a while is XFX. XFX, a long time NVIDIA-only graphics card manufacturer, is being punished by NVIDIA for their decision to start producing ATI cards last year. XFX will not be getting any Fermi chips in the “launch window” for the GTX 470 and 480 cards.

In what might not be a coincidence, XFX announced that they’ll be releasing a factory-overclocked high-end ATI Radeon HD 5970 card for release soon in what will surely compete with the GeForce GTX 480 cards from the other loyal NVIDIA manufacturers.