NVIDIA Prepares 195.xx Linux Driver, Carries Fermi Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Prepares 195.xx Linux Driver, Carries Fermi Support

It was just last week that NVIDIA had finally released a stable 190.xx Linux driver after this driver series had been in beta for months. The 190.xx driver series brought new hardware support, OpenGL 3.2 support, VDPAU improvements, and a fair amount of other changes...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzY4MA

[droidhacker]

Open source?
No?
Not interested.

[Heiko]

Fermi shipping in December?
All rumors I hear are pointing to February/March 2010. Perhaps a paper launch in December with very limited numbers only going to developers.

[rohcQaH]

Now they just need to create a fermi that fits the driver. Easy going.

[deanjo]

Originally Posted by Heiko

Fermi shipping in December?
All rumors I hear are pointing to February/March 2010. Perhaps a paper launch in December with very limited numbers only going to developers.

Actually that sounds more like the ATI 58xx series.
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20091105PD213.html

Everybody except Charlie says their sources say Late Nov/Dec launch for Fermi.

Back to the 195.17 drivers that the article is about, they are solid as usual and looking forward to posting up the openCL bench results with PTS when I get around to it.

[Ranguvar]

SLI, anyone?

[Game_boy]

Now Nvidia is suggesting Q1 2010. "Ramp" usually comes well before retail release for all CPUs and GPUs I've heard of.

“Next year it is going to be an interesting first quarter because, in fact, we will need more wafers than ever in Q1. The reason for that is because – and I mean more 40nm wafers than ever in Q1 –we are […] fully ramping Fermi for three different product lines: GeForce, Quadro and Tesla,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia, in the conference call with financial analysts.

Nvidia’s first quarter of fiscal year 2011 begins on the 26th of January and ends on the 26th of April, 2010.

[from Xbitlabs]

Charlie, not to be outdone, is suggesting it won't be at retail until May.

[Heiko]

Originally Posted by deanjo

Actually that sounds more like the ATI 58xx series.
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20091105PD213.html

Everybody except Charlie says their sources say Late Nov/Dec launch for Fermi.

Back to the 195.17 drivers that the article is about, they are solid as usual and looking forward to posting up the openCL bench results with PTS when I get around to it.

I know plenty of people who own a HD5870, so I think you must be mistaken. On the other side: Charlie definately isn't the only one who suggests Fermi won't be available in huge quantities before Q1 2010 (as pointed out above). By the way, looking at some of your other reactions in these forums: we all know you are in the green camp.

[Ex-Cyber]

Originally Posted by deanjo

Actually that sounds more like the ATI 58xx series.
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20091105PD213.html

I'd expect that 40nm yield problems at TSMC (the reason cited by the article for the 58xx shortage) would affect Fermi worse than HD58xx, since Fermi is a considerably bigger chip.

[Game_boy]

@Ex-Cyber

I agree - look how much yields suffered with the very small chips GT216 and GT218. They should have been launched around the same time as AMD's first 40nm in March (HD4770, which was much bigger than that anyway). But they were OEM-only for months (i.e. poor yields) and are only just at retail.

HardOCP is also suggesting Q1, independent of Charlie. However Charlie's been (semi-) accurate about a lot of things recently. The fake Fermi card at GTC (which Nvidia then admitted to). Evergreen shader count. The GT218 delays. The EOLing of the GTX200 series (stocks are extremely low). The codename of AMD's next chip (Northern Islands).