Guru3d has an editorial today on the problems that NVidia is having with the launch of GeForce 470 and 480, which are Fermi based chips. The feeling is that will likely have a paper launch of the two gaming graphics cards in March, with a very low production numbers after that. Starting in the 2nd quarter, the availability of the long delayed cards will improve. If you take a look at the article, he lists clock speeds for the GeForce 470, but sidesteps giving any performance numbers. From the article:
Initially NVIDIA ran into a can of worms with the A1 revision of GF100 (Fermi), yields have had to be incredible horrible as they very quickly shifted to revision (build) A2 of the ASIC. After revision A2 was out some time passed and TSMC reported that the majority of their 40nm issues had been solved. Good proof of that is that ATI is pushing out many DX11 class product in much diversity and reasonable volume. That means the wafer yields though likely not very good where okay enough. So there's something else going on as well next to yield issues. Either a bug slipped in or the thermal package is causing issues resulting in lower than anticipated clock frequencies and perhaps heat related issues.
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