Our sources are whispering that Nvidia has promised Fermi chips and Fermi boards in February. The final specification should be closed one of these days if it wasn't closed already, and the partners can start planning the final cards.

The first batch is naturally controlled by Nvidia and partners will only get to buy cards, but at later date someone might even dare to make its own design. This is naturally very unlikely due to big cost and the fact that Nvidia gets too scared that something might go wrong.

The mainstream Femi will end up in partners’ hands and they will manufacture these chips on their own, but this is still at least one quarter after the original GF100 Geforce single chip high-end card.

Nvidia partners barely have anything interesting to sell, and marketing wise they have nothing to advertise due to obvious inferiority compared to ATI’s offer. Hopefully this might change with the introduction of Fermi, but again, we expect shortages of these cards as they should be very desirable.