Nvidia suffers more board shortages

WE RECEIVED WORD that Nvidia partners are suffering another chip/board shortage, and that the situation is rather dire in some parts of the world.

It seems that the back to school period emptied both chip and PCB warehouses and now partners are desperate to get more boards, since the demand isn't going away. According to several partners, almost the whole of series 8 is on back order, from lowly 8500 to 8800GTX chips. This especially touches volume partners - high-end AIB partners have a limited supply of the 8800 boards, but the backlog is definitely long on more than one side.

After AMD botched the release of Radeon HD 2900XT with its decision not to go with more than one SKU, the company effectively surrendered high-end market to massive amount of 8800 boards on the market: single 2900XT cannot compete versus price flexibility ranging from 8800GTS 320MB - whichstill has problems with textures, GTS 640MB, 8800GTX and 8800Ultra. This was additionally segmented by various overclocked versions of the cards, and the result is obvious: single GPU addresses around 10 price brackets, from $250, $300, $350 - all the way to $900 USD for water-cooled boards.

The current situation exceeded plans Nvidia had for summer, and TSMC simply did not produce enough chips in June and July to satisfy the supply. As far as mainstream and low-end parts go, company did not win enough OEM deals, and Graphzilla is now beavering away with 65nm parts for the mainstream and low-end. Those markets are the ones where AMD put its iron grip on, and won more contracts that yours truly has fingers - a first after the takeover.

You can expect that this situation will offsets itself in Q3 results for the company, meaning the revenue/profit will not be as high as it could be, but you can still expect record numbers.

The sky is green with dollars in Satan Clara right now, but the partners are ones that are operating on razor-thin margins, not Graphzilla. µ