GeForce GTX 400 series to be available in higher volume than Radeon HD 5800?

Bright Side of News claims NVIDIA's Fermi GPUs will be available in much higher quantity than anticipated. Some early rumors said only 9,000 boards would be available at launch, but the site heard this is totally wrong and that more than 50,000 GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards should be available in the first 10 days of sales. For comparison, AMD had about 20,000 Radeon HD 5800 cards available at launch, and even today it's still hard to get your hands on cards like the Radeon HD 5970.

Moreover, BSN also learned that NVIDIA shifted allocation of its 40nm wafers from low-end DirectX 10.1 parts to Fermi. These DX10.1 parts not only played in NVIDIA's plan to capture 80 percent of Arrandale design wins, but also enabled the GPU maker to keep the highest possible allocation of TSMC's 40nm nodes for itself.

For instance, we learned that more than one AIC vendor ordered 10,000 boards all on their own, and that was the volume higher than some of malicious rumors that were spread around by ill-informed individuals. While we do not have the complete number for "Day 1" of sales, we know that nVidia sales team approached all sizes of AIC manufacturers and even accepted the terms from vendors that only wanted to see the GPUs. Yes, we should even see a custom design GTX 400 at launch. According to leaked images online, don't be surprised if we see more than one board design carrying DisplayPort connectors.

Getting back to the subject of nVidia's allocation and how come it has more than 2:1 ratio with Cypress GPU at launch, we learned that there is quite a good reason why nVidia's GeForce GTX 480 will come with 480 cores, as we first reported here. According to the sources at hand, nVidia was only able to produce a lowly board figure with 512 cores enabled [low 10s of thousands], thus there was a situation with potential shortage and a media and market backlash. The company acted upon the situation at hand and limited the number of cores, radically increasing the amount of functional GF100 dies. As a result, there should be more than 50,000 Fermi boards [this may not be the final figure, as we could not contact all AIC vendors and OEMs] available in the first 10 days of sales. According to our sources close to heart of the company, nVidia wants to overtake the number of Cypress GPUs [both Hemlock and Cypress, i.e. 5800 and 5900 Series] by the end of this summer. This does not include the mainstream parts of Evergreen family, to which AMD is steadily approaching the number of three million shipped dies [the three million mark should be hit very soon, if not hit already].