VR-Zone

While Nvidia's is releasing its high end Geforce GTX 400 series products on March 26th, possibly a paper launch, David White, CFO of Nvidia, is already talking about the mainstream derivatives of Fermi.

“Fermi will show up as the GeForce and Tesla first and it will definitely show up first in the highest-performance configuration. Sometime in the mid-part of the year we will see a lower-cost version of that come out both for Quadro and Tesla,” said David White, at Goldman Sachs Technology Conference.

Interestingly, the lower-cost version was mentioned directly for only Quadro and Tesla, with no reference to Geforce. We are not quite sure what to make of it, but mid-2010 does sound unrealistic for a GPU - rumoured to be GF104 - which has so far been absent from any reports. Indeed, Jen-Hsun Huang himself stated that lower end Geforce products are still adequate. Perhaps, judging by these two statements, Mr. White was talking of Quadro and Tesla, whereas Mr. Huang was talking about Geforce.

It is certainly a confusing situation. Unless Nvidia have quietly and secretly taped out a mainstream Fermi GPU, mid-2010 does seem unlikely, whether it be Geforce, Quadro or Tesla. Unless "mid-2010" is stretched to late Q3 2010.

Surprisingly, the GF100 GPU is only expected to release as Geforce and Tesla. It will not be part of Nvidia's largest cash-cow, the Quadro workstation series, as of now.

Reference: Xbitlabs