by Anton Shilov
08/06/2003 | 02:43 PM
Yields of NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5600 and 5900-series of graphics processors have been insufficient and lower than the firm had originally estimated, company’s officials admitted this Spring and also earlier this Summer. Both times NVIDIA’s executives promised to resolve the problem that cost a company quite a lot of money and also did not let NVIDIA to supply all the orders with enough graphics chips, though, it is August and the yields are still low.
<%BANNER[article]%>There were no official statements in regards the reason of poor yields, but a number of sources said that the problem was related to design of the GeForce FX 5600 and 5900-series of graphics processors, not to TSMC. But according to a report from Pacific Crest Securities, all problems with the yields of NVIDIA’s latest mainstream and high-end graphics processors are to be resolved by the end of August.
Mike Hara, Vice President of Investor Relations for NVIDIA, said on the 19th of June at Thomas Wiesel growth conference that the company will update its graphics product family this Fall.
Keeping in mind the claim above, it is not quite clear for what does NVIDIA solve the problems with the yields of the current chips and will probably try to flood the market with such processors in September in case it really plans to phase them out sometime this Fall, probably in October or November. In case the GPU firm announces or starts to sell the code-named NV38 and NV36 GPUs in early October or late September, like it did with the GeForce2 Ultra, GeForce3 Titanium and GeForce4 with AGP 8x support, sales of the current graphics processors – dubbed GeForce FX 5600 and 5900 – will be strongly impacted. Hence, it would be logical for NVIDIA to postpone the launches of the NV36 and NV38 products till November and Comdex Fall, but it would automatically delay the unveiling of the next-generation architecture code-named NV40 and will mean NVIDIA will miss a great promotion opportunity it would not like to miss. Hence, there are still a lot of chances that NVIDIA will reveal its NV38 and NV36 GPUs in September or October.
NVIDIA did not officially comment on the story and assumptions in this report.