Nvidia claims that Nvidia is happy with the current Fermi yields.

Recent rumors indicated that Nvidia had blocked some graphics cores with problems on their GeForce 480/470 chips (Fermi) causing these chips to have less than 512 cores due to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC's) low yields.

"We have a chance to launch a graphics chip with 512 cores in the future," said Drew Henry, Nvidia general manager of MCP business, in an interview with Digitimes.com.

"TSMC's yields for its 40nm process has met our expectations and market rumors about the yields being lower than 20% are completely untrue. We currently have everything under control," he added.

Mr. Henry also said that the Fermi-based GeForce GTX 480/470 chips will offer improvemed performance (by 10%) compared to Nvidia's previous-generation GTX 285, although the GTX 480/470's power consumption is about 15-20W higher.

GeForce GTX 480/470-based graphics cards have already been shipping from most of the major graphics card makers in April and the rest of the GeForce 400 series graphics cards will gradually be launched in the next few months, Nvidia's representative added.