Fermi Puts Yield Rumors To Rest [NVIDIA GM Says 20% Yield Rumors Are Wrong, Hints At 512 Shader Core GPU, Doesn't Care About XFX]

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Rumors begun circulating a month ago or so that NVIDIA was only getting a 20% yield on the Fermi GF100 GPUs. This was allegedly causing the poor supply of GeForce 400 cards, and was causing NVIDIA to actually lose money on every card sold. Drew Henry, an NVIDIA GM, has put these rumors to rest.

As the rumor goes, NVIDIA was getting poor yields on the GF100 chips. To extend what yield they were getting, heresay had it that NVIDIA was cutting the graphics cores on each chip to make more of what they did have. Mr. Henry explains, there were all untrue:

TSMC’s yields for its 40nm process has met our expectations and market rumors about the yields being lower than 20% are completely untrue. We currently have everything under control. [...] We have a chance to launch a graphics chip with 512 cores in the future.

Graphics card manufacturer XFX had exclusively been an NVIDIA manufacturer up until the last year or so. Rumors of a corporate falling-out between XFX and NVIDIA were rampant – and XFX didn’t come out with a launch GeForce 400 card.

Another rumor (and another one we reported here) was that NVIDIA was withholding the GF100 chips from XFX because of their ‘betrayal’ to ATI. Mr. Henry is much more ambiguous on this point, but we get the hint that it could be true:

[...] XFX is not a close partner of Nvidia and the company has a lot of partners such as Asustek Computer, Micro-Star International (MSI), Gigabyte Technology and Zotac that we are currently working closely with.

You’ve got to love that graphics card corporate drama. Of course, it’s possible that although XFX exclusively made NVIDIA graphics cards in the past (and made NVIDIA motherboards when NVIDIA could make mainboard chipsets) NVIDIA never really saw XFX as a ‘close’ manufacturing partner.

At any rate, supply for the GeForce GTX 470 and 480 cards is picking up. Indications seem to point towards a GTX 460 being released this summer and Mr. Henry’s comments seem to hint that a card more powerful than the GTX 480 could be come out, too.

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