Nvidia GeForce GTX 400 Yields Are at 20% - 30%, Further Delays Possible

Even though Nvidia Corp. commercially released its GeForce GTX 400-series roughly six months after the first public demonstration and had to disable parts of the chips to ensure higher supply, financial analysts from Needham and Company claim that Nvidia only has about ten thousand of Fermi-series chips on the market at the moment and that the yields of Fermi chips is between 20% and 30%.

“We are downgrading Nvidia to a “hold” and removing our 12-month price target (was $22) after a series of channel checks indicating that Fermi is not ramping well and there could be further product delays. Based on our findings, Nvidia has very limited supply of Fermi desktop/notebook parts and yields remain poor at around 20-30%,” analyst Rajvindra Gill wrote in a note to clients.

In a bid to improve yields of the code-named GF100 chip (NV60, GT300, G300), Nvidia disabled 32 out of 512 stream processors even on flagship GeForce GTX 480 graphics board, however, after the product was formally launched on the 12th of April, it is still rarely available and where it is in stock, it costs much more than its recommended price of $499.