Chief executive of Nvidia Corp., the world’s No .1 supplier of graphics processing units (GPUs), said during a conference call with financial analysts that the company has shipped 400 thousand of the GeForce 8800 graphics chips since October and is ramping up other DirectX 10-supporting GPUs. Nevertheless, mainstream customers are going to still use the GeForce 7.

“Since October, we shipped nearly 400 thousand of GeForce 8800s. Our focus for desktop GPU is to leverage our leadership position with GeForce 8 into the mainstream market,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive and president of Nvidia.

Launched in early November, 2007, the GeForce 8800 became popular among high-performance graphics enthusiasts overnight. For some reason, Mr. Huang said that Nvidia has already beaten its arch-rival ATI, the graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, by six months in terms of time-to-market with the DirectX 10 hardware. Meanwhile, sources familiar with AMD’s plans indicate that the company’s Radeon X2800-series (code-named R600) supporting DirectX 10 will be released in March.

“The GeForce 8800 has beaten the competition to market by well over six months and counting,” Mr. Huang told financial analysts.

The head of Nvidia also confirmed that the company has plans to release a family of GPUs for notebooks based on the GeForce 8 architecture in time for Intel’s code-named Santa Rosa platform launch, which is likely to be late Q1 or early Q2 2007, which means that commercial shipments of lower-power GeForce 8 are just around the corner.

“We are ramping production on our GeForce 8 family of notebook GPUs, the industry’s first DX10 and high-definition video GPU for notebooks. GeForce 8 will be the only DX10 GPU shipping in the upcoming Santa Rosa notebook launch,” Mr. Huang said.

Nevertheless, in terms of unit shipments, the GeForce 8 family of graphics processors will not crossover with the GeForce 7 lineup till late-2007 or even early-2008, partly because of the GeForce 7’s advantages, partly because not a lot of customers see benefits in DirectX 10 just now and are looking forward more affordable solutions. Nevertheless, the chief of Nvidia indicated that the company will see over a half of its revenue coming from the GeForce 8 family already in late Q3 or Q4, which may mean that the firm hopes to launch mainstream GeForce 8 graphics chips in late Q2 or early Q3 2007.

“I think in terms of units, it is going to take well into the latter part of the year, if not early next year, and the reason for that is because the GeForce 7 is such an incredibly efficient architecture and it is the lowest cost ‘Vista Premium’ solution that we know. In terms of the revenue crossover […] my guess is that it is probably going to be late Q3, Q4 timeframe,” Mr. Huang said.