Nvidia Corp.’s chief executive officer said during quarterly conference call with financial analysts that the company would only ramp up production of its next-generation flagship Fermi-G300 graphics processing unit in the company’s first quarter of fiscal year 2011, which means January – April timeframe.

“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 26^th of January and ends on the 26^th of April, 2010. Therefore, the claim by Mr. Huang means that Nvidia will only be able to start commercial shipments its next-generation graphics cards based on Fermi architecture in calendar 2010, not in calendar 2009, as the company promised originally.

Besides the next-generation high-end graphics processor, which is usually called Fermi (also known as NV60, G300, GT300), Nvidia will also ramp up manufacturing of its next-generation core-logic for Intel Core 2 processors and other products.

“We will be fully ramping MCP89. We will be fully ramping Tegra. Not to mention the 40nm products that we currently have that are fully ramped up, and so I am expecting Q1 to be a pretty exciting quarter for us because we just have so many new products,” added Mr. Huang.

Nvidia on Thursday reported revenue of $903.2 million for the third quarter of fiscal 2010 ended October 25, 2009, up 16% from the previous quarter and up slightly from $897.7 million reported in the same period a year earlier.

On a GAAP basis, the company recorded net income of $107.6 million, or $0.19 per diluted share, compared with net income of $61.7 million, or $0.11 per diluted share a year ago. Third quarter GAAP results included a benefit to operating income of $25.1 million related to insurance reimbursements received during the quarter. On a non-GAAP basis – excluding the insurance reimbursements and stock-based compensation, as well as their associated tax impact − net income was $110.3 million, or $0.19 per diluted share, compared with $111.4 million, or $0.20 per diluted share, a year earlier.

"We continued to make progress in the third quarter with healthy market demand across the board. Revenue was up from a year ago, with improvement in each of our PC, professional solutions and consumer businesses. It’s great to see us shipping orders with our Tegra mobile-computing solution, and growing enthusiasm for our Tesla platform for parallel computing in the server and cloud-computing markets," said the chief executive officer of Nvidia.

Tags: Nvidia, Geforce, Fermi, GT300, NV60