Nvidia's Fermi is delayed

Not expected until some time in 2010.

Nvidia has confirmed that its already much-maligned Fermi GPU based graphics cards won't be seeing the light of day in 2009.

Nvidia will include Fermi-based GPUs in three different product lines - GeForce, Quadro and Tesla - in the first quarter of fiscal 2011 (January 26-April 26, 2010), said Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia's CEO, during a conference call with financial analysts, reports Digitimes.

Obviously this means that Nvidia will ship its new products based on the Fermi GPU range in 2010, instead of near the end of 2009 as originally planned.

This comes after Charlie Demerjian's sources confirmed Fermi's A2 revision had only just finally taped out - which if true meant that real world silicon wouldn't ship in 2009.

Considering that multiple sources are toeing the same line, it appears that Nvidia fans won't be seeing Fermi this side of Christmas. In fact, we tend to doubt they'll see graphics cards at retail before May.

A small ray of light for Nvidia comes in the form of apparent difficulties with TSMC's 40nm process - the same process currently producing GPUs on behalf of AMD.

It seems that AMD might not be able to take full advantage of Nvidia's delay, having to cope with delays in shipping its new 40nm-based Radeon HD5800 series.