During the investor conference call held by NVIDIA last week, NVIDIA’s Executive Director, Mr. Huang said that they haven’t yet started the production of NV30 chips. Although he claimed that the graphics cards based on the new NV30 will nevertheless, start selling before Christmas sales.

At the same time, it is not quite clear what Mr. Huang implied by saying that the production hasn’t yet been started. He either meant the final version of the chip, or the production in general. If the lat8ter is the case, then NVIDIA has every chance to break the chip launch as it takes about 100 days from the beginning of the production until the final silicon is obtained.

Against the background of the problems with TSMC and the reduction of order volumes in Q3, this announcement can be regarded as another proof that NVIDIA is planning to manufacture its 0.13micron chips on other fabs, which turned out to require more time to adopt their equipment for NVIDIA’s needs that it had been initially planned.

As you remember, NVIDIA promised to launch its NV30 in October. It means that the production of the first chips was supposed to start in spring already.