14 DAY TRIAL // Although the next-generation CUDA architecture developed by NVIDIA was, and is, the subject of desire for many consumers, it seems that it will continue to be looked forward to for quite a while. People had hopes that the rumors concerning the delays were false, hopes that NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang completely dispelled. Now, it seems that the commercial shipment of Fermi-using hardware of any kind will probably be impossible before 2010.
“Next year it is going to be an interesting first quarter because, in fact, we will need more wafers than ever in Q1. The reason for that is because – and I mean more 40nm wafers than ever in Q1 –we are […] fully ramping Fermi for three different product lines: GeForce, Quadro and Tesla,” Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive officer of NVIDIA, said in the conference call with financial analysts.
According to this statement, it seems that NVIDIA is planning to release the new technology as part of three different product series. If this is true, it may be a move meant to seize a large portion of the market as a means to make up for the lack of previous releases of DirectX 11-compatible hardware. Advanced Micro Devices (now owning ATI) is very near to launching a DirectX 11-compatible graphics card (Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6). This means that AMD will have several months available to establish a strong position as a hardware developer in this area.
“We will be fully ramping MCP89. We will be fully ramping Tegra. Not to mention the 40nm products that we currently have that are fully ramped up, and so I am expecting Q1 to be a pretty exciting quarter for us because we just have so many new products,” Mr. Huang added.
As part of this plan to make a grand entrance in this marketing sector, NVIDIA also stated its goal to resume the manufacture of the next-generation core-logic for Intel Core 2 processors and other products. This may imply that the disagreements between the GPU manufacturer and Intel may be nearing a resolution.
Though an exact release date has not yet been set, it is quite clear that AMD will have the monopoly on the DirectX 11 hardware market for some time.