One of Santa's biggest problems in 2009 looks set to become the new generation of graphics cards that are manufactured with 40nm technology. Semiconductor manufacturer, TSMC has again been serious problems with its 40nm manufacturing and this now puts spanner in the works not only for Nvidia and their Fermi-architecture, but also already launched circuits from rival AMD. A launch date for the Fermi-architecture has long been unclear but now most of the market that we are united as the earliest to see Nvidia's DX11 architecture sometime during the first quarter of 2010.

Fermi is a monster chip that is difficult to manufacture regardless of technology, but with a faulty production line at TSMC, there is a possibly even more difficult for Nvidia to meet the demands of their customers.

The only light for Nvidia today is that while AMD has serious problems with accessibility. Especially their Radeon HD 5800-series, which uses it in a rather sharp Cypress GPU, with over 2 billion transistors, is conspicuous by its absence in the market. TSMC has no chance to keep up with demand and this is also the only reason as graphics card manufacturers so we do not see any GeForce 5800-cards on the shelves.
Scandinavia's largest computer store, Complete, to be quite recently had a so-called "back orders" of over 4500 copies of the Radeon HD 5870, the Swedish and Norwegian market. Which means that thousands of Swedes are waiting for AMD’s top model from the various computer stores around the country?

Unfortunately, many have to wait until next January when TSMC said earlier that it will get a solution to their problems before the New Year, which means heavily limping deliveries up to Christmas.

Juniper AMD's GPU as a more or less is a Cypress split in half, are in no better shape, but something that also depends on the Radeon HD 5700-series is not like sought after.

But for those who are waiting for a graphics card under the tree, it may be time to prepare for the worst.

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